300 Miles to Galveston by Rick Wiedeman Read Free Book Online

back into his hip pocket, and stumbled toward the front door of an old two-story house known as the home of the FM35s, a local gang of Filipinos and Mexicans who controlled Farm to Market Road 3537, and advertised themselves as badassses.
    As he worked his way up the steps, a slack-eyed young man approached. “You here for shiabu or what, lolo?” Shiabu was slang for methamphetamine, and lolo meant grandfather, though Bane didn’t know either.
    “I’m here for your mother,” he said.
    “Bakit?”, which meant What? He was so shocked he forgot his English.
    “You mother, you rice-picking mongoloid.”
    The young man drew his right hand back to slap him, but Bane crashed his cane into his left knee, and the young man howled. Bane swung again into his temple, and the young man spat blood and rolled off the patio. Another young man in an oversized NBA shirt on drew a butterfly knife from his baggy shorts and flipped it open, clickity-click-click , saying something low and fast as he lashed out at the lolo’s paunchy stomach. Bane brought his cane down hard onto his forearm, cracking it, then slammed it onto his head, again, and again, until he quit moving.
    “Who’s next?” he yelled.
    The floorboards creaked as a pot-bellied man opened the front door. He had a dark green tattoo of a dragon on his chest, facing a flower on his shoulder. His swollen belly was crisscrossed with machete scars – from the drugged look in his eyes, and the shallowness of the scars, probably self-inflicted during a meth-induced fit.
    He raised an old double-barreled shotgun to Bane’s chest, and pulled the trigger.
    Nothing happened. He turned his head and yelled, “ Puto! You didn’t reload!” Puto was Spanish for male prostitute, but in the part of Mexico where pot-belly was from, it also meant traitor . In the Filipinos’ language, Tagalog, puto meant rice cake, so they took it as a mild and peculiar insult.
    Unharmed, Bane stumbled forward and jabbed the man in the throat with the tip of his cane. The pot-bellied man choked as he fell backward, then threw up onto the exposed wood slats, clutching his throat as Bane stepped over him.
    People throughout the house were waking up, even upstairs. Bane walked into the kitchen and saw an old fashioned oil lamp burning on top of the stove, with some aluminum foil and a syringe nearby. He swatted the lamp with his cane, which spat flames onto the wall, climbing and setting the ceiling alight.
    Incoherent yelling, skinny, dazed boys running out of the house, climbing out of windows. Bane enjoyed the flames for a moment, watching them spread like bright clouds across the ceiling. He stumbled through the back door, then entered a dead cornfield, pausing to unscrew his hip flask. “No real men left in Texas. Just women with penises.” Finishing the whiskey, he put the flask back and continued in the direction he’d started – or close enough to it, given how drunk he was. He was not going back. He was not going to stop until he met God or His chosen incarnation of Death – partly because it was hard to turn around, mostly because he didn’t want to.
    He jabbed his cane out like a grand marshal. “March!”
    A hundred yards farther into the dark, dead cornfield, the orange light from the house fire made strange shadows. Every fear he’d staved off with reason, every regret he’d buried with work, every empty moment he’d filled with whisky and women he didn’t love took shape, slashing at his face, tripping his feet, whispering and pounding his skull as the whiskey won the argument with his adrenaline and he spun, grasping his cane with one hand and air with the other, and the cold earth took him back.
    Blackness.
    When he came to, there was the sting of smoke and a pink sunrise. Nearby, a girl cursed.
    He raised his grassy head from the ditch. There was a dead cornfield to one side of him, and the asphalt road on the other, where a girl, maybe 12, was kicking her bike.
    “I can’t