Off the Wagon, Part 1: Lying is like Murder, It's Easier Each Time.

"All good people are weak, they are good because they are not strong
enough to be evil.” --Friedrich Niezche

Ryan never believed it could be this bad.
It had all begun where most of life’s bullshit seemed to concentrate, at work. Ryan was a groundskeeper for an upper class housing community. He mowed the lawns, trimmed hedges, collected trash, all the things that were necessary to keep the rich aesthetically content. He didn’t have to take care of the pool, someone else did that. The poolboy was a skinny Mexican guy who did not speak English, or at least pretended not to. Whatever the truth was, he tended to keep to himself so Ryan did not know too much about him.
The tenants politely ignored Ryan’s presence, and he did not really mind. He enjoyed the anonymity of his job. He was pretty much his own boss, doing whatever needed to be done, at his own pace. This particular Monday, however, Ryan had shown up to his toolshed to find a guy about his own age waiting for him.
“Ryan?” the man asked as Ryan walked up.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Ryan said.
“My name is James. I’m supposed to help you today. We’re supposed to put in a new fence, and they want it up quick, so they hired me to help you.”
Ryan noticed, with a tinge of disgust, that James could have almost been his twin. They were close to the same height, (James might have been one or two inches taller) they both had comparable builds, brown hair, and well tanned skin. There was nothing more annoying than being brought face to face with your own uniqueness, Ryan thought to himself.
“Well let’s get started,” Ryan managed a smile and walked to the shed and unlocked the door. He closed his eyes as he pulled the doors open, he loved the smell of tools. Wood, metal , and oil, all stagnant in the same place, warmed by the sun and mixed together. It reminded Ryan of his Grandfather.
“What lot are we building on?” Ryan asked as he strapped on his coveralls.
“Lot 26, the Robinson’s. They got a dog and they need to have their backyard fenced. It strange that there’s only you here. This is a pretty big place, you’d think they’d need more staff.”
“They do, but it is cheaper to just have me. I manage alright, sometimes I get a little overwhelmed, but in general I keep it all together.”
“They told me the wood would be waiting for us on the property,” Trevor said.
“Well then everything else we need is already in the truck. Let’s go.”
They left the shed, Ryan didn’t bother to lock it up. Once they were in the car, Ryan knew it would begin. They would start to “get to know one another.” Ryan hated small talk. He didn’t feel that there was a need to always be talking, why everyone else did aggravated him to no end. Lot 26 was a bout a five minute drive, and before he had even started the engine his nightmare was made flesh.
“So where are you from,” James asked.
“Lots of places, I’ve lived here for the past five years, so…” James answered.
“Yeah, I just moved here about three months ago. I went to college for two years, but I dropped out. School has never been my strong point. What about you?”
Ryan inwardly cringed. He had a college degree. They had told him that would set him apart, give him an advantage over the uneducated masses. They lied. Here he was sharing the same existence as someone who spent a lot less time and money to come to the same conclusions and life path as he had. The fact that he and James seemed more alike than different made his breakfast curdle in his stomach.
“I …dodged that bullet from the beginning. I never even bothered going to college,” Ryan fought with ever fiber of his being, but he had been sucked in, stopping now would just be awkward, “Where did you go to school?”
“Horton community College. It was all I could afford, for all the good it did me,” there was genuine regret in James’s voice.
Ryan had already lost interest. His mouth seemed to spew questions with no real attention for the responses. Where did you grow up? Are you an only child? Do you play any sports? What’s your favorite TV show? God Dammit! Couldn’t he be left to suffer, in solitary peace, where his torment had no real external representation. He could have built this fence himself. He didn’t need this muddied reflection of himself as a constant, pathetic reminder of his horrible, empty life.
A five minute car ride.
“So I dumped her and moved out here to see what would happen. I don’t know why I picked here of all places, but here I am. I think the coolest part of this job is the fact hat you can actually accomplish something, see the fruits of you labor.”
Ryan had only one incredulous second to contemplate the stupidity of such a claim before he saw the red ball. It was a kickball, a red rubber kickball, just like the ones Ryan had played with when he was a kid. The ball bounced out in front of the truck and Ryan slammed on the brakes. The child that was chasing the ball became a slick red splash across the windshield as Ryan lost control of the truck. The truck fish tailed once to the left, then to the right, and then it stopped.
In retrospect, it was almost impossible for Ryan to remember which he realized first: he was alive or that James was dead. A pickaxe from the bed of the pickup had come in through the back window of the cab, impaling James through the neck. His heart still pumped blood through the severed jugular in a vain attempt to get the blood to the brain, and Ryan found himself hypnotized by the rhythmic stream of life that splattered on the dashboard.
Disorientated and confused, Ryan took off his seat belt. The door would not open, but the window had been broken, so he crawled out of the truck rather easily. The scene was surreally quiet. No one else was around. Ryan could make out a pair of legs, bent grotesquely, sticking out of the drainage ditch on the other side of the road. They were the legs of a child. He could tell because the feet were so small.
The kickball sat in the middle of the road, deflated so it looked like a red pimple on the black top.
It wasn’t even nine o’clock.

This was not turning out to be a very good day for Ryan.
They would eventually track the accident to him. It was his truck, at the place he worked everyday, and it was not going to take a genius to suspect who killed the two violently dead corpses.
He could have explained away the accident, tell the cops that it had been just one of those random system of events that leads to tragedy. He was very sorry that it had happened and all, but the kid had come from nowhere and…
That might have worked had the bottle of vodka in his lunch had not shattered all over the inside of the cab. It smelled like a Russian sailor and his drunk dog. He hadn’t started drinking it yet, but he wished he still had it now. Fuck, he was screwed. This was just what he fucking needed. Right now was the perfect time to go to jail.
Ryan blamed it on that ass fuck asshole who had brought bad luck stuck to his ass like a chili dingleberry. He couldn’t even remember the shithead’s god damn name, but it was all his Christ fucking fault. The sonavabitch. Fuck! Fuck! Godammit Fuck! If he hadn’t shown up at that shed, Ryan would not have started feeling like such a loser, and he would have been paying more attention.
Ryan surveyed the scene. No one had heard it or seen it. They were all probably at work, selling their lives in the pursuit of a new car and a bigger TV. In fact, it looked like the stupid little bitch in the irrigation ditch was the only human alive in the entire neighborhood. Well, at least that seemed to be the case earlier—maybe… Ryan jumped up as fast as he could and half scrambled, half ran to the girls twisted legs.
Hope died in his stomach when he got to her mangled remains. There was no fucking fuck of a way that she had survived. Her body looked like a bloody bird’s nest. She was a clustered assortment of seemingly random items, bones, cloth, and hair, stuck together with some foul red secretion that only some exotic rainforest bird would ejaculate that had congealed in the morning cold.
Ryan lost control of himself then. He vomited, but not physically, he felt more like there was an open bile duct pumping yellow fear into his heart.
Fuck.
That was awful. He had done a horrible thing. A horrible thing to an innocent little girl. He would fry for this.
Certainly he would.
If. If he got caught. Terror entered his body in the form of a bullet made of hope. The desperation of the guilty icily clutched his mind. He could not get away with this. Not without help.
Ryan ran back to the truck. Assfuck had bled out and now looked mildly calm. His blood had redecorated the interior of the truck. Blood had spattered in places, pooled in others, it gave the illusion of serenity. Ryan’s twin’s eyes were closed and his body slumped. Ryan dove at the corpse’s coat searching desperately. Dammit, why hadn’t he caved under the juggernaut of human development and bought a fucking piece of shit cell phone, dammit is that wasn’t the first thing he was going to buy if he got out of this, every jerkass mother fucker had one why didn’t this fuck—
Ryan’s cold hands grabbed a piece of hard plastic from the nice dead guy’s inside breast pocket. There was somebody watching him, Ryan thought. He had obviously stopped laughing long enough to cut him a break.
Ryan pressed a button and the phone lit up. The text said, “You have two unheard messages.” Ryan hoped the messages weren’t important. Ryan could not stifle his laughter. The tension of the situation broke with the maniacal laughter of one damned by a fate outside of his control.
Ryan called Travis.