Chapter 130

Cocksucker.

Rawle felt tears well up into his eyes as he hung up the phone.
If they do anything to Kelloway, I’ll kill them and watch the blood gush out...
He never realized he loved his wife this much. He was finding out just how much he still loved her.
He’d kill for her.

From the gas station, he continued west, hitching a ride with a cool middle-aged guy, a recovered drug addict who was now a Christian minister who preached the word to offenders in federal prisons out here, like Drumheller. He also set up a food bank and toy drive for the children of long-term offenders.
They talked about Rawle’s problems, vaguely, using no names.
The man said he’d been in Drumheller Penitentiary as both an inmate and as a prison chaplain. He had dealt, often, with the gang members there, Gypsy and otherwise.
“I’ve learned that men really aren’t powerful, Mr. Rawle, like you think. It’s the forces that control them that are strong. None of those guys in Drumheller were worth shit compared to God,” the man said. “That is what kept me protected. I’m not afraid of any man on this earth,” he added, dead serious and with complete conviction. It made Rawle feel good to hear somebody say that. It was how he was starting to feel lately. Fearless.
“I’ll tell you something right now. I’m scared of two things, God and the Devil. That’s all. And grizzly bears.”
In Banff, Rawle walked straight through the bright lights of downtown until he reached a bridge at the top of the main drag, across a medium-sized river.
It was very late at night, almost morning and Rawle was feeling exhausted. He walked across the bridge and then ducked down a clammy bank and explored beneath the structure carefully, looking for a dry place to sleep, out of sight from the Banff park wardens.
The muddy bank was very narrow ansd sloped and the stone foundation of the bridge dug straight up into the girder underbelly. Rawle could not see anyplace he would want to sleep. On a hunch, he jumped up and grabbed the top of the stone foundation and pulled himself up into the girders. At the top of the foundation, he could see, there was actually a little stone compartment there. It was a space big enough for a human body, all walled up out of the wind and light. The compartment seemed almost to have been designed for homeless people. Indeed, it was carpeted with dirty cardboard and garbage, indicating that dozens if not hundreds of street people had slept in this very spot before Rawle. Maybe even Kurtis Missions.
It was pitch dark and smelly inside the tiny stone cave as Rawle crawled in. Rawle sat there crouched over. It smelled like rotten milk or jism inside, but he was too tired to care.
The rectangular cave was just long enough for him to lie down in, but was very cramped. He knew that if he sat up suddenly in the night he would clang his forehead on the massive stone ceiling.
None of the trash seemed to belong to anybody or be recent. He spent a few minutes throwing out the most putrid and organic of the garbage down into the river below, and then laid out his tinfoil thermal blanket and put his sleeping bag down on top of that. At least if there were maggots or anything they would be trapped under the thermal tinfoil.
He used his backpack for a pillow, propping his ears and noseholes high above the cardboard, the garbage and the maggots.
Rawle proceeded to feel very much at home and warm, wrapped in filth and insulating stone, high up out of the howling wind and rain. He watched the rain sprinkle and gush into the river water below. He was even aroused by it all, somehow, something about the dirtiness of his new home. He masturbated thickly and productively into someone’s discarded cotton sock and then threw the drenched article down into the river. The bridge seemed to appreciate how low and bestial Rawle’s grunting sounded. It echoed him, like a responding lover.
Rawle watched the river gliding by, wrinkled by the cold rain and began to sink off into sleep, his cock still hanging out, tingling and drooping in the crisp night air… He fell asleep.
“Hey!”
A snorting man was hunched on top of Rawle’s chest in the opening of the cave.
“…Eh!” Rawle yelled again, struggling for breath. A strong foreign hand groped across his belly.
Rawle snapped up and bashed his head on the stone ceiling. The shape grunted something and climbed in further, but with supernatural speed, in a blur, scampered up and out over the water now across the iron rafters that stitched the bridge together underneath.
Rawle leaned up on his elbow and watched as best he could in the dark. The tall, tight gangly human shape zigzagged out across the water, fifty feet up. It stopped in the middle of the bridge on one of the stone pillars that held up the bridge in the middle, and then flipped out a sleeping bag.
Rawle smiled.
A few minutes later, he heard someone else climbing around in the girders, this time in another alcove on Rawle’s side of the bridge. There must have been two alcoves on each pillar. He could see a shape moving around through a square hole in the stone just past his feet. “Jesus.”
He could hear more murmured voices and coughing too, warped and echoed by the stone and the fatigue of his ears. He was partly asleep still. “A city down here,” he whispered.
Judging by the sounds, there were at least ten people moving into assorted crannies in the bridge. “Rat people,” he dreamed.
People nibbled at the trash. One found the cotton sock somehow and was sucking on it with a hungry rat mouth….

The next morning, the bridge skeleton was quiet.
Rawle felt the warm ashes of fear and mystery left over from the night before in his chest. He felt good.
Who in Banff would be living under a bridge? Where to find them in the daytime?
He got up fairly early and lowered himself down the foundation and walked back toward the busy downtown area.
The surrounding scenery in Bannf was incredible, just like Jasper. Sulphur Mountain looked like some kind of weathered Star Destroyer that had crashed into the earth.
He looked around at people on the street, trying to picture who could possibly be living under the bridge. He wanted to talk to them.
But it seemed inconceivable that any of the touristy people he saw could be bridge people.
Rawle began to feel out of place in Banff, right away, worse than Jasper. He knew immediately that Kurtis Misisons would take one look at this town and move on.
Sometime in the early afternoon, he met a group of three girls outside a cafe where he bought a stale muffin and expensive coffee for lunch.
They were stocking up on coffee and were about to leave town for Kamloops for the weekend.
They offered to take Rawle to the Okanagan Valley where he said he was going to pick fruit. All three of the girls were luscious fruit and they could’ve driven him up the ass for all he cared.
In the back seat, the slender one with the brown buzzcut made amused eyes at Rawle as he climbed into the tiny Civic. Her soapy, gold legs were hanging out everywhere and her cute little high-up jean cutoffs were bursting to be shimmied down.
They sped away from town. Rawle almost made an instant move, feeling the incredible urge to touching the slender one’s lusty legs, but the girls in the front seat were asking him all kinds of questions and he had to concentrate. The girl in the front passenger seat was turned around. He almost got a raging hard-on with all the close up conversation and attention from so many beautiful girls. Rawle hadn’t spoken to a girl in days and hadn’t slept with one since before Kelloway was poisoned.
He’d never been in this part of the country before either. Jasper was one thing, but this was just mind boggling. The Rocky Mountains loafed incredibly on the roadside no matter where the little vehicle went. It was like they were on a raft in the middle of an endless ocean. The mountains looked like some kind of colossal, prehistoric mammals crusted over by seas of renewing trees. This was Rawle’s real entrance into British Columbia and the Rockies. Even the highway could not escape them. It scurried up the sides of them and chewed little tunnels in their toes.
This was truly ancient, broken turmoil of the earth itself, all washed into being beautiful and clean by time, vegetation, water, wind and gravity.
In time, he thought to himself, his own remains would be gazed over like this by some serene beings of the future: His ashes and bones would be the calm, white leavings of a once-tormented life at last at peace.
The foul rot of all his effort and life long blown away.
The girls dropped him off at noon, in a place where the massive orgasm of the mountain had become an after-shudder of hills and valleys, the Okanagan Valley, Kelowna.
The scenery was like big bowls of golden cake and blue ice-cream.
Rawle stood alone at the north end of town, feeling something start to pull at his breath a little.
Kelowna was tucked in at each side by big rolling hills, bright yellow in colour with sun-burnt grass, just drizzled here and there with dark pine trees.
He started to get nervous.
Kurtis Missions was here.
Panic.
His mind began to race. His hands, teeth and throat started to become dry.
His long dry hair blew around his dry eyeballs. He was having a panic attack.
He felt like he was made out of spazzy, whipping-around dry breath, nothing inside him solid…
His throat began to swallow, spasmodically and his eyes blurred and lost focus, rusty gas began rapidly inflating inside his gut...

Then just like that, the panic vanished, and the world came lethally into focus again. He was the same age as Kurtis Missions.
They both were born at the beginning of time itself.
For some reason that made him laugh and laugh, by the side of the road.