In Continuum.

Russell Jones Is Dead

Rusty is dead.

I remember the day when Rusty told the boys about joining the military over at the Wild Bucks, we all thought that the alcohol got to him sooner than we expected that night, since it was only half past eleven. The initial laughter and roaring curses were replaced soon by reality and astonishment, because Rusty really was joining the military.

The boys exchanged glances, remembering the old Rusty that we all knew from the college days, while quietly exchanging looks of distaste for the man that we've all knew for too long, the man who was about to leave us for the greater good. The ignition of a secret bond never spoken across the tables or even after alcohol consumptions, was triggered only by the eventual departure of one of ours. How hypocritical this world is, and it's not like I am spared from that comment either.

It has been six years since that fateful night at the bar, and to tell you truth, during the funeral nobody shed a single tear. Except for that Tracy McCellan, Rusty's college sweetheart - my college sweetheart, too. We were all there and took turns to say our last goodbyes, but at the stone cold body of Rusty's, not a single word of farewell was said with absolute truth and honesty, as we later found out and laughed about it.

He was lucky enough to have his body delivered back from Iraq, and not like some of the people we've seen on the news, where they filled coffins with photographs and roses. He didn't deserve the nation's flag over his coffin, and certainly wasn't worth the tears of Tracy McCellan. To be dead in one piece was good enough for him, and to know that he didn't die from any battles but alcohol overdose was even more ridiculous to the people at the funeral.

We all knew and harbored the smirk that was threatening to show on our faces. But his parents were there, and so were his other relatives who attended. His wife Kelly was right next to me, with their two kids, Marvin and Gayle. So deep into my mind I buried the smirk, and hopefully nobody noticed my efforts for doing so.

I don't quite remember how Rusty ended up in our gang of brothers at the bar table, and certainly don't remember him ever saying anything good about our government. Politics flared in the dusty air often, and Rusty never backed down about his stand against the administration. Something came over him six years ago perhaps, to join the army and serve the nation. It was probably the egoistical and the hypocritical side of him that took over, the way it did ten years ago when he slept with my girlfriend and got away with it.

Oh, Tracy. She was a good fuck in bed. I remember the first night when she lost her virginity to me, the way her insides felt like silk slippers against my bare skin. We were in the car, by the lake over on the other side of the town one night, and the music was playing softly over the radio, our favorite song from the 80s. Her breasts filled up my hands, firm and compacted at the same time, and I remember wanting to be there for the rest of my living life.

Then came Rusty and his previous gang, banging on our car window with cameras flashing, hollering away deep into the night, something about selling the pictures to the students in school and how Tracy was going to be more famous than Anna Nicole Smith. Of course, they were merely joking about it, and trailed by a dust cloud they left in their own convertable in roaring laughter, heard in my mind even after the dust settled and the tail lights disappeared around the bend. I remember Tracy crawling away from me at that time, with her blouse still hanging loosely from her shoulders, her cleavage exposed and yet, expressed nothing of the burning desire for me like it did before. That was my first time, and the last time I ever had sex with Tracy McCellan.

The next time Tracy and the word 'sex' appeared together, it was through the mouth of Rusty, and about how he did her on his parents' bed while they were away, speaking proudly over lunch one day. I still don't remember how, or who brought him into our gang, but that person must have been a saint of sorts to give in to his stupidity. And the rest of the gang - Charlie, Damien, John, Henry and Wayne - must have been out of our minds to have tolerated him for that duration of time. Eight years, we have been 'friends', eight years we have called each other that. But perhaps, the term was merely for the six of us, and Rusty merely claimed to be worthy of that title.

Though we all knew that in Rusty's eyes, nobody except a woman with a great cunt was good enough for him. But of course, that status usually lasts as long as the love making. By the end of that, the woman falls back to earth like every one of us, cursing into the skies at Rusty the Great, upon his fabricated wings of hypocrisy and self-delusions.


Russell is dead.

Dealing with his death was a pain, not really because of the fact that he left Marvin and Gayle to me all alone, with not much of an income to speak of, but because of all the hassles that I had to go through. Buy the coffin, inform the friends, buy a suit for him even though he was as dead as a rotten log, and all the other 'arrangements' - which the people from the funeral home said so nicely, however crude it might be - that I had to make. And you thought that he was a trouble in life, in death he has to throw all those bullshit on me.

It's not like I never loved Russell. I did, I truly did that summer seven years ago when we met at a bar downtown. Russell was with a couple of his friends at that time, that same old gang he got to know while he was in college. He was the outspoken one, the handsome one, the flirtatious one and most of all, the one my girl friends talked about constantly in whispers and under breaths. He came over that night and asked for a dance to the song on the jukebox, and thus started the youthful romance between the two of us that never lasted longer than our relationship before the marriage.

I never believed in the statement that a marriage dulls a relationship, that love dies after the wearing of the stone. Aunt Annie joked about it constantly over dinners during family reunions long time ago, about how Uncle Frank lost his love for her and of course, in other areas of their love life. Usually, that kind of remark was dismissed by the laughter around the table, nudging of Uncle Frank by whoever was sitting on the side of him and the slap of his wife on the back. And by the word 'dismissed', I meant that I never took heed of her words, took them as a mere joke and ignored her supposed warnings. I was naive and I was wistful, and the marriage of those two words in a person's personality can spell utter and absolute disaster.

The chase is always the fun part for men, and after the chase a man shrinks back into the pathetic corner to smoke on a cigarette and grow a beer belly. Russell was never truly that kind of men, but shrank into the corner he did, like the way a man's penis would after an overnight sex. To tell you the truth, he was never truly good in bed, and it is a wonder how he had all those rumors and stories from the bars about how he slept around even while we were together. With that kind of skills, I assume he probably paid the whores to have sex with him, because while I won't say that I am a person who is hard to please, he displeased me. And that speaks volumes.

Right before he was sent to Iraq four years ago, Jody called me late one night about spotting Russell at the local bar with a woman when he should have been in camp. Furious, I drove the car down to the bar in the middle of the night and followed him and the girl all the way to a rundown motel by the side of the expressway, the kind prostitutes would choose to meet you when you don't want people to see you. But I was there next to the dusty window, peeking through the gap in the curtains, and watching as my husband fucked that whore upside down in the motel room, with a look of fake orgasm on her face. Even with a paid slut, Russell was bad in bed. What a pathetic jerk.

He begged and he wept on his knees that night, stark naked and still sweating from the efforts he put in to please the whore, who was then getting dressed and taking a drag on her cigarette, clearly used to the sight of a begging husband and an angry wife. He swore that he would change, and begged for me to forgive him. But the fact that he was crawling at my top and almost yanking it off my body sure wasn't helping his case. I forgave him eventually, simply because he was waking up the other customers at the motel and was embarrassing the hell out of me.

He told me that he would change after Iraq, that he would come back a different father and a husband all over again. I told him that he was never a husband in the first place, and a father only because he fucked me. He slapped me right after that, and left for Iraq with most of the people in his previous life bursting in a party of joy, quietly and discreetly in our minds. Even the look on his gang's faces during the funeral spelled of discreet joy and satisfaction for his death. But I don't blame them, because I figured one of their girlfriends probably slept with him anyway, and the living Russell and the dead one made no difference. He was as good as dead.


Dad is dead.

Even twelve years after his death, I still recall the day when Marvin answered the door while I was in the living room studying with Carla. She left right after the news was relayed to us from the two military men at the door, dressed in smart green uniforms, feeling sorry for the family but hardly knew anything about the our history, anything more than the fact that the family he was speaking to was the Jones'.

The both of them didn't notice the look on my mother's face, how she was clearly distressed not because of the death of my father, but because of the troubles ahead even at his death. My mother never liked him, and I doubt if she ever loved him at all. At least in my lifetime during their marriage, they were as good as strangers even in bed, sleeping on the same mattress and sharing the same blanket. They were next to each other and a thousand miles apart all the time, leaving Marvin and I to fill the emptiness between the two of them and the silence that pierced.

My dad loved Marvin more than me simply because he has his eyes, he once said. Playing ball in the backyard when Marvin was young was his favorite hobby away from camp. I remember the way the students in my grade school took turns to tell the class our fathers' occupations, and the class would applaud at the fact that my Dad was a military personnel. Personally, I never saw any pride in having a father serving the country, especially not a country with a government such as ours. Everybody thought like the 1860s and during the Civil War - which wasn't civil at all - that if your father served for The Cause, then he is a honorable person, no matter what kind of family he came from or what he did to his family members...

I never realized what they meant, but it was my father's way of showing me that he loved me, though it was drastically different from the way he showed Marvin his love - by playing catch. When I was much younger, I remember my Dad sneaking into my bedroom in the middle of the night, and without a sound he would reach into the blanket and start touching me all over. At that time, I wondered what he was doing, and once in a while asked him what the matter was. But he merely asked me to keep quiet and go to sleep, while his hands touched my underdeveloped breasts and then down between my legs. From over the edge of the bed came the sound of shuffling fabric, and then followed by his soft moaning in the deep of the night.

That happened over and over until the age when I grew old enough to tell people things, but I never did about this. He threatened me every single time he touched me, and told me never to tell anybody about it, or I would face consequences. I never felt comfortable with his hand all over me, but at the same time, never the guts to tell anybody about this. Shame was one reason why, and the other was the overwhelming fear the man I call "Dad" had over me whenever we made eye contact.

The eye contact was disturbing, not because it looked hungry and desperate, but because it didn't. He would sit at the dining table and talk to you like an ordinary father would to her daughter, or speak about you openly to his friends about you and never give a hint about what he did to you only hours ago in the middle of the night. The truth is, inside those deep pools of blackness in his eyes, he harbored the desperate and hungry beast that preyed on other women and even little girls like myself. But none of us dared to go against him, none of us had the courage to stand up for ourselves only after one person did it: Death.

You can call it whatever you want, be it a 'chicken' or a 'coward'. But personally, the chill that he gave me whenever he pretended that nothing happened, chilled me to the bones. And even till this day, the eyes still haunt me at night when I feel my boyfriend's hands on me. Jerry is a good boyfriend, the polar opposite of my father. In fact, my mother loves him so much that she practically treats him like her own son. But the sensation of his touch, the way he caresses me in bed, transports me back to the time when I was young and when my Dad had his hand between my legs and jerking off at the same time.

I hated my father, and I still do. During the funeral, I held on to my mother's hand so tight, afraid that the descent of the coffin into the neatly dug hole would drag me into the grave with him. His secret would be buried with his death and coffin six feet under and within my mind, but I was afraid that he would drag me down as well, down to his level and haunt me forever. That was why I held on tight to my mother's hand, afraid to let go. Peering up through the veils of her hat, I noticed the curl of her mouth as the first soil landed on the glossy wood, the way it resembled that of a smile, the smile that I had on my own little face as well.