"I wear the skin of the soulless animal."

-Tommy Sotomayor

Up the worn, crumblestone way he walked, walked normally, like a man of middle years, past the old time pool, long since filled in.

Three homeless hulks stood above a pit fire, warming their hands under blankets that covered them like spectral shrouds. Their eyes came to rest on him with hatred, suspicion, hunger perhaps and then return to the important pursuit of watching their owner’s hands rub together before the fire. He envied them their simplicity, would perhaps be among them if not for his darling Betty and her delicate needs.

He hit the incline under the light of the slivered moon, noticed that the cracked and un-patched road was a long ribbon of campsite, with fire pits and sleeping flats literal carved from its bed. He stepped off to stride uphill in the grass, the wet autumn grass that made him smile—and his hip caught.

Damn! Anger flashed across his brain, anger at the return of pain, the adrenaline worn off from his recent adventure.

As the leering shadows camped along the greenway road stopped to leer at him, he steeled himself to go out fighting, to go out thinking of Betty, somehow to send his love across the miles.

A hulking man with matted dreadlocks spilling down over his shoulders, his pungent reek permeating the night, rose to bar his way. Tom refused to abandon his recently re-acquired dignity and poise and simply smiled and said, “Good morning, sir,” and somehow, as if by miracle, the brute stepped aside.

The entire camp stopped, man by brutish man, to observe his small, crooked progress alongside their lineal lane of repose.

A giant, bald white man, naked but for a canvas tarp wrapped around his waist, stood and glared at him with one eye, blinking in the moonlight and Tom nodded his respect.

He passed the iron form of the ancient Indian sculpture, upon which two large lovers—weirdly content men of an ancient night—hung their clothes to dry upon the statue. The two stopped, looked at him, looked at one another, joined hands and observed his process, as if they were viewing a one-man funeral, and perhaps it was.

A fire flickered in a pit beside the road as three blacks roasted a dog on a spit, a large dog, a dog such as he once played with as a boy, eons ago. He could not help but glare at them in disdain, certainly to bring his end, their mindless assault. The brutes meekly gave back, wide eyed and huddled together behind the roasting dog, crouching and intertwining arms in some daisy chain of repentant gargoyles.

His hip caught again, his leg shorting, his stride breaking, his gait bringing humiliation, advertising his infirmity. But the brutes only shivered in response, holding each other, the largest shaking with lips aquiver.

It then occurred to Tom how haggard, how near death, he must seem. He was afraid, on reflection—to even spare a peek at his cut leg. Perhaps these frightened brutes saw their doom in his faintly fading frame.

His hip cracked again as he crested the hill and continued along the asphalt way through the remains of what was once a golf course, where cannibal—or so they said—fiends sat in conclave, squatted in menace, committed their filthy sins by the light of the moon.

Ahead, as the grade slackened, he saw the tents of the tribal sets, where the bands that recognized no authority, who defied Islam, the BLM and the police made their camps, well-organized on the side of the road, sentries posted.

Here, as if they living pillars of warding, two grim-faced giants, one holding an axe in hand, the other with a half-dozen or so golf clubs twisted into an unwieldy club, stood, legs far-braced, braided beards sweeping their canvas-covered chests. They barred his way with rounded shoulders, uncaring eyes looking down as if from some great moral height. But he was wearing down and could not slow down or he’d die here, never to take another step again, never to see his sweet Betty.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he posited, and as if he were some fairytale boy rubbing a ghost-haunted lamp, they did as he secretly wished, as he had not dared hope and gave kindly way for an old gimp on his last leg.

The one with the axe grunted, the other hissed, but they let him by.

With half a mind to look around, but afraid that would give away his bluff, Tom noted that one followed, most likely the axe man, for the haft of his great axe rang dully on the still paved way behind him, keeping mocking time, perhaps escorting him for ritual slaughter and consumption, perhaps—in some wild fantasy of redemption—to see him safely home to his dear, crying Betty.

And so he continued, hobbling like an old tethered goat, drooling like a fool too stubborn to take his pain medicine, between the tents of the murderous men with no allegiance but to their hair-matted own, who came gathering, whispering at the roadside—for this was their great processional way, their Boulevard of the Allies, the place where their parades were made.

Tom nodded, with feigned confidence, apparently made more convincing by the stern set of his chin, which was now beginning to hurt like the dickens from where that yo-punk had hit him, seemingly ages ago.

An ornate yellow tent, from which billowed dope smoke to his left, marked the tribal tent of the “Arabers” the men who used to sell local produce, black men who formed an anti-Islamic cult, had enjoyed a brief moment of fame, and now gathered here in their final numbers, perhaps ten men in their bandana-festooned jeans and flannels.

Further along, a group of wicked looking skin-heads came to peer fixedly at him by the roadside, as he dragged his broken body along on two throbbing feet, the gout returning after all these years. There was neither hate nor pity in those hard blue eyes. His escort continued to mock him from behind, perhaps herding him to some ultimate authority among these brutes. He did see no evidence of cannibalism and might have guessed that these outcasts were the most decent of what remained of men with balls—considering which, he seemed to have torn one loose—Damn, you Jones!

The haze of pain was agonizing, clouding of thought, ambient and sublime in its own way. He recalled that long ago night, sporting blood through a shattered nose, chasing that devil from Ohio around the ring. Yes, a defeat it had been, but it still steadied him in troubled times.

Onward he hobbled, lurching along, his cruel, singular parade seemingly attracting every homeless man in this great camp, The Greenway they called it, where men reverted to a brotherhood of trust and deeds in the shadow of the crumbling city that had no disgrace left to heap upon them, no toll or tax remaining to apply. It occurred to him then that he had hauled his broken body two torturous miles through a drone free zone and was now nearing the far gate, where The Tribe kept guard, the only group of these feral men other than the skinheads and the Arabers that he could place. The tribe were Rastafarians of a homegrown American sort—not real Jamaicans. They had their own bullshit prophet that gave speeches through a bullhorn on the street, who was said to have been a pro wrestler way back in the day.

The Tribe gathered, perhaps thirty-strong, in a crescent under the steely moon, the sky now swept clear of clouds, stars still a stranger to the sooty night. It occurred to him then, that if they killed him he would have lived his last night on earth without seeing a star, first for the clouds then for the smoke of these gloom-dancing campfires.

It then further occurred to him that he could not recall the last time he had seen a star in the smirched night sky.

He saw him there, the giant, rug-haired, big mouth, without his high and might megaphone, but holding a great machete between his hands, barring the road in a most personal fashion to the smallish travesty of worn anatomy hobbling towards him, sorely mocked by the axe-bearing giant behind. He soon came before the sweet-smelling man, who seemed to anoint himself with cinnamon, and reluctantly stopped.

The chief glared down at him, the blade of the machete casting the silvery moonlight across his muscular frame. “What you doing, skulking here, Whiteman?”

Tom Jones hurt in his back just to speak, but had to feel her name form in his mouth again, “Betty, I’m going home to my wife, Betty Jones, and if I were a young man I’d slap your face for preventing me.”

The man shivered as the others gave way and the giant behind him advanced with a thunk of his axe handle, no doubt poised to take Tom’s head in some cruel rite.

The man then shivered again, ground his teeth above his mighty jaw, and snarled, “We don’t want your return, Mister Skulker Jones—gladly will we let see you gone.”

With those cryptic words the articulate monster of a man, like a living, sweet-smelling cartoon, stepped aside and motioned that the road was clear through the open gate ahead.

Tom, unsure if he could even make the next step, felt a tear roll down his cheek, a tear of pain, as his hip caught and he teetered to a halting lurch and all the pain of that long ago fall across that railing sizzled down his legs.

“Konk,” came a metallic ring behind him, sending a chill up his spine.

“Klink,” came another, startling him, for he knew that sound, knew the ring of that thing on asphalt.

“Klank,” came the ring of steel on stony tar and he sought to turn and see if his mind deceived, and his spine would not allow it, more tears gushing down his face like the pained fool he was.

“Klunk,” came a definitive thud of harshness as the giant chief’s knees knocked together audibly and another big-smelly brute whimpered like a girl.

Beside him had come to rest his pimp cane, the adamantine shaft of Greaser-whooping redemption, topped by the glossy globe of mahogany, inset with the silvery likeness of a man who might have been Sargon of Akkad. Over the likeness of the ancient king rested the chin strap of the derby hat which had so recently saved his life.

There was only one thing left to do—well, two.

Tom grasped the cane by the globe, lifted it with invigorating reverence, plucked the fine derby had from its place, set it upon his head. Vibrance flooded his pain-wracked being and spring returned to his step. He twirled the cane in childish joy—causing thirty burly, desperate men to dive onto their bellies—and strode jauntily off into the remaining night.

There was, however thanks to be given, courtesy to be observed. So he turned his head completely around—it was such a habit of his, from the days of his pain, not to twist at the hips—and he was so thrilled that his renewed vigor permitted this additional flexibility of the neck that he smiled, as he spoke, “Thank you, Martin. Enjoy the night—it’s all we have left.”

Martin’s eyes—as he rested upon one knee—beamed fear and astonishment as one pulse of emotion.

With a crunching pop of the neck, Tom Jones set his eyes back on the road and walked on.

Behind someone vomited, but he was confident that it was not Martin Thomas, better known among his tribesmen as Mondo Tom, born in 2016, to Joann Thomas and Martin Johnson, most prophetically, at Good Samaritan Hospital, at 2:35 a.m. on Tuesday, September 27th.

The street beyond soon rang with the strident ring of redemption. As if it were some great white hound summoned by its master rattling its feed bowl, came a tumbledown cloud, a proud denizen of heaven, cast down and felled, cursed to crawl among puny Man’s pitiful warrens as that accursed creature known as fog. It was enough to make a creature of the burning sands leap for joy, save that the precepts of Dignity among Degeneracy stipulated the discipline of the smile—not so lowly as a smirk, not quite a grin, nor a smile waxing hopeful, merely a recognition of some mortal chagrin, under heaven, in these streets grown mistily dim.