Synopsis: In this chapter, Rayne and Jack have a terrible fight and they split, but Jack, despite the congratulations he receives from his mirror self, discovers what is really important and comes to make a very important decision.

This chapter took me longer than it should have, considering that I wrote most if it in one sitting and the rest in another one nearly weeks apart. This chapter is really important to me because it's approaching the most important, most pivotal and most emotionally heightened chapter of the book, a chapter you will not want to miss for you life. It would be like missing the toll-booth scene in The Godfather. I'm still not sure whether or not it's written the way I want it, or contains the things I want it to, but I believe so. If it's confusing, good. Some of it should be. :) But, I hope you can enjoy it, I beg of you to favorite it and please, please, please, please leave a comment before you go. And if it's not too much trouble, please pass it around! :)
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Chapter 15: Welcome to the Grand Illusion

“You had a gun and you didn’t use it?” Rayne demands of me, marching back and forth in the aisle up the center of the camper. “All that time, we were running like idiots, you could have ended it with a pistol you had the entire time!?”
She marches back towards the table and then stands there in her ragged shirt and tight jeans, tail whipping around angrily, ears folded back, staring at me with distaste and hatred. I just hide my eyes inside my hands, propping my arms up onto the top of the table. Rayne has been angry with me for the entire drive, but now it’s just getting so much worse.
We pulled off of the road once we were a good distance away from that place. After crossing a low creek on a stone bridge, Rayne led the truck into the dirt overflow parking lot on the side of a motor hotel that sits at the very edge of a growing town. She has since been demanding where I got the gun and why I refused to use it until then.
But no matter what answer I were to give her, she would just come up with a million more questions and batter me with them, no answer ever satisfying enough. I don’t want to tell her everything, not everything, but with every question, she keeps getting closer and closer. She refuses to let up on this storm.
“No, you waited until I was within inches of falling to my death before you finally pull that thing out, don’t you!?” She screams.
“No, goddamnit, I didn’t wait until then!” I yell, lifting my head up and focusing my eyes on her.
“Then why did you wait?” She demands of me as she turns her head back towards me, realizing she has a better target now.
“Because that pistol isn’t something that should be brought out at the first sign of trouble,” I explain.
“Why, can’t you handle something as powerful as that?” She yells to me. “Can’t you put on your big boy pants and do something right for once, you immoral ass?”
“You couldn’t understand it, you moron, having to pull a gun on my only living uncles!”
“They’re goddamned puppets, genius, if they wouldn’t have backed off, what do you think would have happened?” She yells, stomping over to the table and slamming her hands down. “What do you think they would have done?”
“They would have dragged you out onto that speeding road.” I say with a shake of the head.
“That’s right; you would have let them kill me!” She accuses me, pointing down towards the floor as if it were the road. “You would have let two of your own flesh and blood kill me, let me splatter onto the highway going by at a hundred and ten miles per hour.”
“And what would you have me do?” I say, slamming my hands down onto the tabletop as I turn my fiery eyes towards the prosecutor doing their cross examination. “What would you have me do, then?”
“I would have had you kill them!” She retorts without missing a beat.
Rayne stands up and walks away from the table, her paws moving as quickly as her tail does, darting around behind her. I just watch her go with my jaw hanging slightly open. All the sickness from the fight had gone away about an hour ago, but now I’m just disgusted by what she has just said.
Watching her walk to the end of the camper, Rayne doesn’t stop moving until she is as far away from me as she can get without leaving the vehicle. Then she crosses her arms angrily, huffs and stands, weight shifted to one leg, staring out of the window behind the truck looking onto a wide babbling brook surrounded by lush green grass and a high hanging tree.
Slowly I begin to scoot out of the seat and as I get out into the aisle, I stand up quickly and angrily. Making my body seem wider than it is I take up the entire walkway beside the table and the counter. Then I look down at Rayne, who is slowly beginning to calm down. But, I’m not going to let her end this fight, no matter how arbitrary or asinine it is.
“You would never understand it.” I say gently, looking towards Rayne.
Rayne turns her head, her short Butch-cut black hair swinging around with her head. Her eyes, lucid and blue, now seem shook up, red even, as she peers back to me. Her thin black lips pull down angrily, and she slowly begins to turn around on heel. I gently begin to step forward.
“You never could understand it, having the life of another human being at your fingertips.” I say to her. “You couldn’t understand what it’s like to know that somebody’s life is gone, somebody is dead, because of you. Yet you stand here and tell me that I should have shot my uncle in the head, point blank with a three-fifty-seven magnum revolver.”
“What are you saying?” She demands of me.
“What I’m saying is you’re too caught up by your anger towards some faggot with a fetish for twenty’s clothing to know that you’re going to kill two people, two innocent people!” I scream as loudly as I can my whole body shuttering. “But what’s worst of all is that you’re going to stand there and accuse me of trying to kill you because I didn’t kill my own family! Because I didn’t shoot my own flesh and blood! You’re a fucking idiot!”
“I am not a fucking idiot!” She yells back, taking a few slow steps towards me. “You’re fucking blind, trying to hide behind something like family, they’re Blackjack’s meat puppets, Jack, and they’re not your uncles! And you’re weak, weak for not being able to discern who the enemy is and who isn’t!”
I suddenly become quiet and stare at her. She huffs, her chest rising up and down from yelling at me constantly for nearly twenty minutes. Her own body shakes and shivers with her anger and her eyes dart around, looking over me as if she were looking for a place to put a bullet.
Suddenly I close my mouth hard and then shake my head, turning my eyes down towards the ground. Now I don’t even know who is right, Rayne or him. I don’t even know who the enemy is and who isn’t, just like she said. Now I’m not sure who is more deadly to me: Blackjack or the girl standing ten feet away from me.
“Yeah, you’re right.” I say and look to her.
“Finally,” She says with a sigh and loosens her body up.
“You’re right about one thing: I don’t know who the enemy is and who isn’t. I thought the two puppets chasing me for some magic man with a chip of his brain missing were the ones that were really trying to kill me.” I say slowly, sorrowfully. “I thought the enemy was the cheap piece of trash trying to marry my mother and send me away. I thought the only person who wasn’t my enemy was the emotionally scarred girl who wanted just the same thing I wanted: Freedom. But now I don’t know anymore. Not when that same friend demands me to kill my family instead of finding a different solution.
“I don’t think you could ever understand why I chose them over you. I don’t have much family left, I’ve watched so many of them die. You could never understand what it’s like to live for six years knowing he’ll never come home from work. You’ll never understand how I let my own father walk out of the front door to go to work and never come back. You’ll never understand the pain, the guilt, the shame, knowing that it’s your fault. You don’t know the pain, the absolute pain and sorrow of losing someone that close. That’s why I chose them over you. Because I can’t watch another family member die at my own hand. Not for somebody who demands me to kill them.”
Rayne drops her arms down to her side and then begins to shake her head back and forth in the same way I did just moments ago. Then she turns her eyes onto me and narrows them into slits, staring at me with contempt. Raising a hand up, she erects her pointer finger away from her clenched fists and then jabs it towards me through the air while she shakes her head.
“You’re a whack job,” she says, holding nothing back, “you’re a crazy selfish lunatic who has more conversations with his reflection in the mirror than he does with actual people. You’re a monstrous freak who destroys anything when he hears the things he doesn’t want to hear. You’re no better than the man you’re trying to run from. Not when you would rather risk everything because of some repressed experiences than move into the future and accept the things you can’t change. You’re an emotional cripple, Jack Walker, and I pity you.”
We are both silent for the longest time and then I nod my head.
“Good, then that makes two of us. I never asked for you pity, I asked you to get the fuck out of this motherfucking pickup truck and leave me the hell alone, and yet you can’t leave. Why is that? Why is it you keep staying with me despite all this shit you absolutely despise? I’m not some puzzle for you to put together, a broken toy for you to mend. You know exactly what the fuck I want, now get the hell out of here.”
“You’re wrong. I know exactly what it feels like.” She says and shakes her head. “I just . . .”
She drops her arms to her side and then we are silent. She sighs, shakes her head back and forth and then turns around. The door leading outside screeches on its rusting hinges as Rayne pushes it out. Steadily, Rayne walks out of the truck and then slams the door shut.
The silence following is so thick I could almost cut it with a knife. But I don’t move to break it. Instead I stand still, staring at the door and wondering what will come next. Slowly I begin to smile, knowing I’ve finally gotten rid of her, but then my smile begins to dissipate. Looking around the room, I suddenly see how alone I really am.
I swallow hard whatever lump has formed in my throat and then I paw back to the table where I plop down in the pillowed seat surrounding it. Then I put my elbows up onto the tabletop and rest my head down into the soft pads that stick up through the rough, yet supple fur. Closing my eyes, I sigh audibly and sit in silence.
“See, she’s finally gone.” I say to myself. “It’s what I’ve wanted, desired, for days now, to finally end her incessant whining. I mean, it is what I wanted, isn’t it? I didn’t want to have to listen to her telling me what to do! I didn’t want to actually kill my uncles . . . even if it did mean saving her.”
“No, no, Jack, you’re right!” His voice comes through loud and clear. “You’ve finally gotten rid of that ball and chain forming around your ankle, now you can finally gun it home. You can escape this hellhole called Iowa and make it home in time to save what family you have left.”
I open my eyes and gently glance over into the window looking out onto the side of that motel. There I see him, sitting in the couch that wraps around this table, just on the other side of the plywood board they call a table. It’s just when I look across the actual table, he isn’t there, so I watch him sitting back in the reflection on the window.
He smiles wide and then sits back, relaxing into the upholstered seatback. He smiles wide, showing row after row of jagged, razor-sharp canines. Something looks different about him though, he almost looks . . . cartoonish. His eyes are tinted red and his teeth look yellowed either from age or because of how twisted he is.
“Yeah, I know, she’s gone. She’s finally gone, after asking me to do something I would never do.”
“Yes, Jack, how could she ask you to kill your own family? What kind of heartless, selfish bitch asks somebody to do that, huh?” He asks, leaning forward and pointing to me across the table.
His hair tumbles around on top of his head, moving around for the first time that I’ve known him. His fur bobbles around, seeming to shed from around his cheekbones. His nose twitches and the jacket he wears, despite looking like mine, seems like somebody put it through a washing machine. It seems worn, dried out and ripped. So does the white t-shirt he wars. It seems yellowed and sullied.
“I couldn’t choose to kill my family.” I say and watch him calmly. “I mean, I know . . . I know what the situation is, I’m not denying that.”
“No, no, of course not, Jackie, my boy, you just couldn’t bring yourself to kill family. I mean, you watched your grandmother die, your grandfather disappear, you learned your aunt was raped at work, and then watched as your father disappeared into a man that came to the door and said ‘I’m sorry about your loss’.” He kindly, almost sickeningly so, comments and comforts me. “How could she ask you to bear the loss of more family, but, even more, to be the one that takes them away?”
He leans back and crosses his arms, his long, blackened claws tearing into that black leather jacket, the one that looks so much like mine yet so much not like it. He smiles wide again, showing me his teeth. I just sigh loudly and close my eyes. Something is just not right here and I begin to really feel it.
My stomach twists up in my abdomen and I feel the muscles around my tail begin to clench, almost cramp, in pain. My calves and the muscles that reach around my toes and claws begin to pain me and finally I double over. Putting my cheek down onto the tabletop, I wrap my arms around my chest and moan, as if somebody just struck me in the gut as hard as physically possible.
“But now you’re free, Jack; now we’re free!” He happily announces. “Now that she’s gone, we don’t have to worry about her. We don’t need to know whether or not he’s tracking us through her. We don’t need to feed her or listen to her talk. Why would you ever miss her?”
“I don’t know, but . . .”
“But what Jack?” He asks me. “But, absolutely nothing, that’s what, Jack! Don’t think about her anymore.”
“She’s just gone.” I say quietly, almost to myself only. “I’m going to be here alone, alone as I’ve always been and alone as I’m ever going to be. At least she cared about me, but I never cared about her. So instead of making a new friend, I drive her off. I feel so sick, I feel like somebody hit me in the heart.”
“Don’t worry about it, Jackie, my boy, everything will go right back to the way it was.” He says happily. “Everything will be normal again.”
I lift my head up and look towards the window, towards his relaxing refraction in the glass. Then I blink and sigh loudly, shaking my head before finally looking beyond the reflection, beyond him sitting there. Beyond it the sky is beginning to darken as a storm front is beginning to make its way across the breadbasket of America. Suddenly lightning strikes off in the distance followed by the low rumble of thunder.
“Normal, what is normal? No, nothing will ever go back to normal.” I say loudly.
Another bolt of lightning travels up into the sky, branching outwards in a violent yet beautiful display of nature’s power. The light that comes from it covers the glass with a brilliant white glow and after it dissipates back into the normal shine of the day, I see that he is gone yet again into the ether.
The rain seems almost surreal, that this storm could possibly be following us across the country, all the way from Montana. The sky, as black as rubber, threatens to soak everything and maybe wash away whatever has been built up out here. Rayne is out there, most likely without any money, chased away by my own stupidity. I lift and slam my elbows down onto the tabletop, some hard and angry thoughts swarming like a shaken hive throughout my head.
Thrusting myself up away from the cloth seat, I slide out of the booth seat and begin towards the door. I don’t know how far away Rayne must have gotten, but on those lithe and strong paws of hers, no doubt she could have sprinted a mile by now. I have to catch her, before the storm does and locks her down. There is no way that I could forgive myself if her death was on me.
When you kill somebody, they don’t just go away. They stay with you. You don’t just leave a body when you kill it. When you kill somebody, you own them. I’m already carrying one person with me for the rest of my pathetic and useless days; I don’t need another, especially one I’ve cut down in her prime.
As the light aluminum door swings open at the end of my outstretched arm, I stomp down the two steps and drop onto the ground. With the edge of my long, sharp, deadly claws, I catch the edge of the door and slam it shut behind me without a flick of an eye. Then I step and feel the humidity surround me. Not only can I see and hear that storm coming, I can feel it on my very skin. It’s hot, a fast-mover, of the kind that wipe away entire towns on the plains in a matter of hours.
Rayne it out here somewhere and I have no idea how she’ll ride this thing out, if she does. Glancing at a that little stream that we crossed over, the one with the steep banks that went under the stony bridge, I note it mentally, wondering if that is what is going to try to take her. I can’t believe we parked, or that somebody built a motel, this close to a creek that could overflow in a bad storm.
But I don’t have time to take the kind of precautions that I should be trying to take. Turning on heel, I stomp around the passenger side of the blue pickup truck and then stop at the chromed bumper at the nose of the old reliable vehicle. I stare across the parking lot of the motor hotel and up at the flickering neon sign stuck up on an erect pole next to the road.
The building looks almost abandoned, save for the lights flickering on and off near every door. Its walls are covered in caked-on dirt and the antenna stuck up like posies from the flat roof remind me of an unkempt graveyard. But the lights in the office attached to the far end are on and a thin man wearing a black trucker cap leans across the counter inside, reading a dirty magazine and smirking a little bit. There is only one car in its parking lot, and I doubt he’s there because he’s staying here.
Sitting on the edge of this cracked, two-lane road cutting across the Iowa farmland is a 1977 Lincoln Continental Mark V. The hood is hung up and the bulky body of a man leans over the side, his head and arms stuck down into the engine. Looking around, I cannot see anything else between here and the nearly half-mile difference between the motel and the town just up the road. Maybe that man saw Rayne, I mean, a six-foot tall half-woman, half-silver fox is pretty hard to miss.
Slowly I begin forward, my paws scraping against the stony ground. I suddenly wish that I had the same sort of boots that Rayne was wearing, the ones tailored for her paws. But I continue forward without complaining. I approach the man with confidence, not slowing down, not even to wonder if he’ll stand straight as a gravestone and scream at the sight of me.
As I approach the man, I hear him cursing loudly in an oddly familiar voice. His long legs covered in a pair of khaki pants and ending with brown leather shoes, move around impatiently as he messes with that engine. His slight beer gut hangs against the hot metal of that luxury vehicle, a gray jacket clinging to his body. A hand comes out, covered in grease, wipes against the pants and goes back in.
“Hey, buddy,” I calmly say as I near him.
“Huh, what do you want?” A voice asks, frustrated and angry.
I stop a few steps away from him and look to his back. He seems entirely too infatuated with that car to even lift his head out to peak at me. In fact he doesn’t take his eyes away from whatever it is he’s working on in there. Taking another step forward, I look in through the window of the car and see that the vehicle is in pristine condition. A black blanket fills the back seat, covering what looks like a bunch of clothing.
“Did you see somebody run by here?” I ask him.
“I don’t know, wasn’t paying attention to anything but this damned car!” The man screams back, his voice deep, gritty.
The man then coughs the cough of a man addicted to cigarettes for forty years of his life. His entire body convulses with each hack and then he bangs his head against the roof of the hood and steps backwards quickly. I watch as one hand goes to his waist and the other goes to his face. He turns his body towards me and coughs until finally he spits on the ground phlegm the color of mountain dew, despite his teeth being white as pearls.
When he lifts his head up, I get a really good look at him and he does me as well. A heavy round face is covered with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache and emerging five o’clock shadow. Black eyebrows top off deep brown eyes and just across a large, wrinkled forehead is a receding hairline of deep black ebony. A gray flat cap shades his face from the sun.
“No, I can’t say I’ve seen any of your buddies, buddy.” The man says and takes a cleansing breath.
Wiping his hand off on a handkerchief produced from his pants pocket, he steps by me and goes back to the door of the vehicle. He steps by me as if he sees nothing more than a normal eighteen year old man looking for a friend. Opening the door of the car, he plops down on the leather seat and then goes for the ignition.
After twisting the key, the starter kicks on and he attempts to start the vehicle. But instead of staring, the vehicle emits a loud, terrible grinding noise the sound of which I never want to hear before, especially from a 460 cubic inch V8 engine. Immediately after hearing the noise, the man stops the engine and then sighs loudly.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with this thing!” He yells out in frustration.
After popping my ears with a twist of the jaw, I cross my arms and look to him.
“It sounds like the pistons welded to the insides of each of the valves, which is why the pistons won’t move.” I say with a rough guess.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, you’re kidding me.” The man says.
“That’s what it sounds like, but, without some really big tools, I can’t really check. Maybe checking the oil level and coolant level might help.” I say.
“Well, I have some tools, but I don’t know about any of this.” The man says as he steps from the vehicle. “Are you willing to check it for me?”
I turn to him with a bat of the eye, still sort of confused as to why he can’t ‘see’ me, or if he does why he doesn’t care. I look to his face, still feeling like I know the guy, like I’ve seen him somewhere before, but can’t really bring forth a face to match his with in my mind. Then I quickly shake my head. Rayne is still out there.
“No, no, I can’t. I still have to find my friend, she’s out there and I need to bring her back before this storm hits.” I say.
I turn away as a bit of thunder rolls in the distance. Turning towards the town just a little bit off, I sink my hands into my leather jacket pockets and begin to step forward. I listen to the man cough behind me again, the same way he did before. He then spits on the ground loudly and then clears his throat.
“Was it a little thin lady with short hair?” The man screams out.
Stopping dead in my tracks, I feel my eyebrows shoot upwards. For a moment I look over the ground and then, as if checking over my shoulder for a sneaking thief, I twist my neck around and look back at the man, standing as still as a Greek statue at the Parthenon.
“How did you know that?” I ask him with distrust.
“How did I know what?” He replies, playing dumb.
“How did you know what she looked like?” I say, swinging my body around on heel like a soldier. “You said you didn’t see her!”
I charge up to him with a finger erect on my right hand, my other gnarled into fist poised to strike. The man’s eyes never leave mine, his body staying rigid, obviously not threatened by my anger or hostile demeanor. When I see that he doesn’t move at all, merely blinks, I feel myself loosen.
“Do you always get angry at other people like this?” He asks me without missing a beat.
I recoil at the question and look directly into his eyes, my once tense face now as loose as a hooker in the red-light district. Dropping my arm and letting free my fist, I stand straight and even take a slight step away from the man. My jaw drops open and I stutter for words.
“That’s always been your backup, hasn’t it, boy?” The man continues. “If something catches you off guard, or you don’t trust somebody, or something happens that you don’t like, you turn towards that bottomless anger. Worst of all is when something happens . . . that’s not in your control.”
The man raises his hands up and wipes them over with that handkerchief, his face not marble, or twisted with hate. His tone isn’t angry, but merely as if he is stating exactly what is. I don’t feel angry, not one bit, instead I feel naked. I feel like somebody just struck me where it hurt, but the worst part is that there is no shield to life up. I am exposed.
“And I know people like you, boy; I definitely understand the problems you’ve faced. No matter how many achievements you make, no matter how much you succeed, you always see the next challenge as a disappointment. Like there is no cheese at the end of your maze, just a note promising cheese in the future and yet another maze for you to solve. Why is that, son, why do you see things that way?” The man continues to prod. “Is there no level of success that is sufficient for you? No IQ level, no degree on the wall, no amount of money in the bank, no amount of friends, family, lovers, will ever be enough, will it? Why is that?”
“I . . .” I try to interject, to no avail.
“No, no, please, let me finish, if I may.” The man says and reaches forward with a gentle hand before returning to wiping them over with that linen cloth. “It’s because there is something you’re compensating for. And all I can say is that you must let it go. You are forcing away some of the important times of your life because of something outside of your control. And because you are doing this you will ruin yourself. But you won’t be the one that suffers the most.”
“I didn’t come here for a lecture; I came here to see if you saw my friend!” I yell out, feeling sorrow replace anger.
“But why do you care about this friend of yours?” He demands of me. “Is it because you want to use her?”
“No!” I say.
“You basically disregard her kindness for days, you kick her around, you force her away, and you even try to dump her on the roadside several times. Do you suddenly think that she’s some baby who can’t take care of herself now? That she’s not an eighteen year old woman?” He yells out a bit louder.
“No!” I scream in response.
“Then why, why do you give a shit about her!” The man screams out.
“Because I love her!” I yell out. “I love her!”
Lightning flashes in the distance and thunder cracks out. The man’s face flashes a bit and I feel like I see something else there, but when the lines clear up, everything is the same again. I stand with my legs wide apart and my fists up, my arms shaking with weakness and my eyes stinging.
The man stands, his face as calm as if he has just met me for the first time and the previous discussion never occurred. His grip around the handkerchief in his hand loosens and a gust of wind picks up. It pulls at my hair and jacket, sends a cool breeze through my fur and my loose clothing. The wind grabs the man’s white handkerchief and yanks it from his grip.
The piece of cloth whirls around in the air before him and swooshes over his shoulder before landing on the ground and sticking there, out beyond the trunk of his car. The man turns his body and looks towards the handkerchief before glancing back at me as if asking me to pick it up.
I nod my head and oblige, stepping forward and past him to get it, my tail stuck between my legs. Kneeling down on the ground, I put my claws gently around the piece of cloth, making sure not to rip it. As I pull it from the ground, a gust of wind tries to steal it from me, but I make sure to grab it tight with both hands and hold it.
“The question you must ask yourself now, Jack, is: What is the best thing for her?” The man’s voice enters my ears. “Should you drag her down into the affairs which you cannot handle yourself, which stand poised to corrupt you, fill you with blackness and consume you and threaten to consumer her as well? Or should you let her flutter free, a bird from a cage, yet leave you in sorrow and solitude? Choose wisely, lest it bring harm to what you consider sacred.”
I stand back up and quickly look over my shoulder. The man is gone and that seemingly brand new white Lincoln is now a rusting hulk, with the glass smashed out, two tires missing, the others flat, and the paint as faded and cracked as Keith Richard’s body. I’m not sure what I just witnessed and experienced, but I think it’s just as screwed up as the last week was.
I stand straight and look westward. The rain has begun to pour out upon the greening fields and I know within moments it will be here. I know I must do now, what is best for everyone. What my mother is doing is only what is best for her, and, by stupid coincidence, me, and I must honor her choices. What my uncles are doing is only by compulsion and what Rayne is doing is from pure compassion, an untainted caring bubbling from her own heart, something I can never understand.
Looking downwards at the handkerchief, pure white and unstained from the grease of the man’s hand and the dirt of the ground, I see it is made of the finest silk and hemmed into the edges are blue thread. In the bottom right corner, the initials ‘C.W’ is sewn, the colors are not yet faded. It’s the only thing that remains from what may be a pure vision, or a cheap magic trick.