Episode 4: Louisville Sucker-Punch

Fetch catches up with Jonas and calmly expresses his displeasure.  With a bat. 

Guest Stars: Cupcake and Tea (http://www.youtube.com/user/CupcakeAndTea), Michael Spense, Kevin Erhart as Em Caulton, Sean Roberts as Willie Fetch, Barb Ross as Margaret Hess.

Radar Masukami reads the Episode 3 Recap

Excerpt:

February 17th, 2009

Turns out I can take a punch.  Actually, let me rephrase that.  Turns out I can take a fairly severe ass beating.  It's been a bad day and writing is painful, but I'll get as much said as I can before I have to stop.  "Bad day" may be the understatement of the century.

Let me start at the beginning. I went to church today, less for the religion than the company.  Everyone in town goes to church, so it's normally standing room only.  There aren't many true holy rollers anymore,  because if God has a plan for all this, clearly we're not part of it.  Who knows, though, maybe this is the second flood and he plans to wash us all away and start over with what's left.  Unfortunately, if Greenly's an ark, he left us without a drunk to steer us to the mountaintop.  So, no, I am not personally religious.  I used to be, but not any more.

But since there's no television, movies, or video games, church is one of the few things that makes one day any different than the other.  That, and the heat.  During church Horace fires up a wood stove and a few gas heaters, and for two hours we can all take our coats off and stink together.  We don't have a pastor any more, since he was part of the Paradise Falls expedition, so we take turns reading the services.  This adds an awful lot of "ummms" and "errs" to the bible that may not have been in the original translation, but at least they're trying.  We avoid Revelations.  It hits too close to home.

After the sermon, half a choir trudges it's way through a few hymns and then we hold a memorial service for everyone who we've lost in the previous week.  The first few months these were somber, serious affairs but after so many deaths, it's hard to take them personally anymore.  If the rest of the family is already gone, and the deceased had no close friends, we just go through the motions.  If it's my day to read the eulogy I'm more partial to Hamlet or Emily Dickinson than the Bible.  After nearly two hundred funerals we know all of the good funeral verses by heart.  People rarely cry, even for family members or close friends.  You just get to a point where you don't have any tears left.  Death is as much a part of life as breathing to us now, and most of the somberness has to do with the society we lost, not the person.  Another dead body is just a symptom of the greater disease.

The last funeral that really made an impression was the service for the Paradise Falls expedition.  But even then, we weren't really mourning the deaths of our friends, or family members.  It was a funeral for hope.  That was the last time anyone who wasn't a deputy left Greenly, and the day most of us finally accepted that we'd die here.  Horace did the service himself, reading the names of the group one by one, as Sarah sang "Amazing Grace" quietly in the background.  That was the last time I cried at a funeral.  To me, it was a funeral for civilization.

When services finish we gather in the common room for some coffee made with grounds that have been brewed four or five times already. If we're lucky we can cut it with some sugar or syrup.  We talk, catch up on gossip, and people talk about what they're going to do when this is all over.  We like to pretend that one day the government will sweep in here, and tell us everything has been put right, and we can go back to watching prime-time TV.

The best part of coffee hour is when Marian Hess and I get to play book swap.  Marian runs our town library, and that's as close to a movie theater as we have right now.  On Sundays she gives me first crack at the new acquisitions. The entire living room of her house is filled with mismatched bookshelves, organized by subject instead of author.  There's a bookshelf for detective paperbacks, a shelf for textbooks, half a shelf of poetry.  She keeps and organizes comic books and magazines for the less serious readers, and I try to pick up a few comics for Wendel when I can.  Wendel is obsessed with comics.

She's got a huge hope chest filled with collateral, and tips are completely up to the borrower.  I leave a hammer, and take Keats.  I return it, throw some bullets or soap her way, and grab a few Sanford paperbacks.  If I need the hammer, no sweat.  I leave something else.  It's very good system and Marian and her son Luke run it like true professionals.  Luke is in his late twenties and used to be a damn good car salesman from what I've heard.  Most of what they earn with the library they spend to expand it.  I just wish they'd let me buy instead of rent.

"Don't be greedy, Mr Waight," Marian will say in her stern, librarian way, "Knowledge is for everyone."  She's right of course, I just wish she'd let me keep a few.  I've got a minor book fetish.

Today I skipped coffee to avoid Sarah, which was painful because Marian had been hinting about some new textbooks the deputies brought back from a hunting expedition. Non-Fiction is my favorite, to the point where I've even perused an anatomy text book when I was hard up for reading material.  But I couldn't deal with Sarah, not after what she showed me on Saturday.  I felt her watching me the whole service, giving me evil little smiles whenever she managed to catch my eye.  She was wearing a white, long sleeved dress, and looked angelic, but I could feel the tattoos hiding underneath, pictures of things a seventeen year old girl shouldn't know about, let alone be able to depict in ink.  Her being in church made the whole place feel dirty.  She was defiling it with her presence.  When the final song was sung I was first out the door and I didn't look back.