Horrible Harvest

Otto give me a dead-eyed glare at the diner. Mourners gathered there to sit with the loss of Felix in a group, eating fresh made water pie and drinking coffee, some with cream, some with whisky, most with both.

Can’t say why I went. The Widow Jeffries asked me. That’s true enough, but it ain’t the reason I went. A fella like me ain’t got much in the way of friends in this world. S’pose I went to sit with others who loved Felix same as me. Being with them all in the tiny eatery, packed in shoulder to shoulder, the air rumbling with talk and tears, with laughter, with remembrances spoke out loud, I just wanted to be touched by it all. To give my friend and brother, a brother by spirit, not blood – I wanted to give him a last goodbye, and with all the people there giving him their thoughts and words, I felt like he’d be there in the stories they told and in the ache they’d share over his passing.

I half didn’t expect Otto to be there, but be there he was, and he let me know without uttering a word I wasn’t his favorite person. As hateful as his stare was, I invited it because it was the closest I’d get to having Felix look at me ever again. They was similar in appearance. They was more so in their youth, but their wrinkles and brown spots give form in much the same way over the decades, and if I let myself let loose of reason and common sense, I could imagine that Felix was the one giving me a cock-eyed look from across the diner-way.

He’d throw’d me the same glare with some frequency in our years together. I got him in enough tough times that he give thought to strangling the life out me more times than I can recollect. Outliving that little pestering sumbitch wasn’t a thing I thought would happen. In the most sincerest sentiment possible, I wish like hell he had strangled the life out me, so I wouldn’t have to sit in a diner with a crowd of people trying to conjure him up out of invisible memories swimming through the air.  

Otto turnt sideways to greet a woman who know’d Felix in some kind of way, and I saw it. The saggy skin on his neck went taut, and his jowls lifted back into the rigid jawline of a man 40-years his junior. He looked so much like Felix that my mind shot back to a time when we was riding with the Bunning Brothers, on our way to Memphis, not long after we stripped the treasure away from all those Chattanooga plantation blueblood shits.