The Sapphire Express by J. Max Cromwell Read Free Book Online

had licked me hard and almost taken my head off.
    It didn’t take long before he stopped coming altogether, and that was the end of our little neighborly heart-to-hearts. I was fine with that, though, because I was busy planning for my curious future and trying to understand the new me. I simply had no time for Sandy and his homemade pain. In fact, I was getting tired of the whole damn neighborhood and slowly starting to realize that a change of scenery was the only way forward for me. I was no longer the same man who had lived in that dream house with my loving family. I wasn’t a father, a husband, or a math teacher anymore but a wretch of a man who had been forced to become so free that he had actually ended up in prison. I had no responsibilities, and I was accountable to no one, not even to God. I had been transformed into something that did not even have a name.
    That new creature knew that he needed to move away from the adorable suburban people and their barking dogs, and live alone somewhere where silence was the only king in town. He knew that he was dangerous and unpredictable and no longer belonged among the happy and hopeful, the ones whose dreams were still alive. He was tired of being sad and didn’t want to live in that depressing house anymore and breathe its heavy, air every time he closed his badger’s eyes—every morning he opened those sad peepers again and remembered that his family lay in the wormy ground.
    That creature didn’t, unfortunately, have the necessary money for the move in his bank account, but, fortunately, a pleasant surprise had arrived in the mailbox in the form of a life insurance compensation. Eden had always been very kind to the door-to-door salesmen who rang our doorbell on hot summer days, and she had found it very difficult to say no to the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime offers they carried in their tawdry black briefcases. Sometimes she hid behind the curtains and refused to open the door altogether because she didn’t want to say no to the salesmen and disappoint them. On one occasion, she even ran upstairs and crawled under the bed and put her fingers deep into her ears until the salesman was gone.
    I am not exactly sure what had happened on that evening when the lucky life insurance salesman rang our doorbell, but for some peculiar reason, Eden had decided to purchase a shiny new policy from him and keep it hidden from me. I think she did it more out of kindness and compassion for the hapless road warrior than for fear of the premature arrival of the Grim Reaper, but whatever the reason for buying that insurance was, I was its sole beneficiary, and the check was now safely in my wrinkled hand. It was a fairly decent payout, too, four hundred thousand dollars; more than enough to provide a new start for a confused man who was lost somewhere in the lonely hills of the posttraumatic world—a world where working for a paycheck was no longer possible.
    I owed some money to the government and a couple of private lenders, but I decided that I would not pay them back—not a dime. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore, and I felt like I had paid enough taxes, interest, overdraft fees, handling costs, and whatnot already, so I was just going to keep all the money and tell them to leave me alone. It was a good and simple plan, but I knew that I needed to be very careful because the greedy pencil pushers would try to steal my money if I gave them even the slightest chance to do that. But I wasn’t going to.
    To be honest, the IRS, the banks, or the goddamn municipal code, for that matter, didn’t intimidate me much after I lost my respect for death. They transformed into something that didn’t really concern me anymore; something that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about. After I had emerged from the sunny end of the meat grinder alive, all the almighty laws and regulations I had so much feared, and so meticulously followed my whole life, had become weak, even adorable. They were