Reincarnation: Somerset Maugham
"Has it occurred to you that reincarnation is quickly proof and a justification of the evil of the world? If the evils we have a tendency to tend to suffer unit of activity the results of sins committed in our past lives, we will bear them with resignation and hope that if throughout this one we tend to strive toward virtue out future lives are less afflicted."
mom looked stressed and I was sure I knew why. The rent on the dump was due and she hadn’t made near enough to pay the landlord. Although I was only ten, I knew that she could have paid the difference in other ways, but she hadn’t yet sunk that low.
We lived in a small two-room trailer parked out back behind the landlord’s business. He sold junk cars, scrap metal and whatever he could pick up and resell for a profit. From the fancy car he drove, I guessed he must have made some money. He always had a big wad of cash in the pocket of his ratty old jeans. I tried to stay out of his way, there were times when he looked at me as if I were candy.
The trailer had been one of those nice ones pulled behind a pickup truck but had been sitting there for the last twenty years. It was heated by a small furnace run off a twenty-pound gas bottle and it was my job to carry it to the convenience store and exchange it for a new one. Cost about twelve bucks and we had to fill it twice a month in the summer, more often in the winter. I usually made enough picking up cans for the most part and the rest I found scrounging in the back seats of junk cars. People lost all kinds of things in the creases of the seats. Once I found a diamond engagement ring – I pawned it for a lousy twenty bucks and saw it later with a price tag on it for $400.00.
Mom was pretty. It wasn’t just me saying that I heard other people say it, too. She was tiny, blonde with huge blue-green eyes, dimples and curved just like those Barbie dolls. Dudes were always hitting on her and it pissed me off. But then, I was only a kid and couldn’t do anything about it. She’d told me that her people had come from northern Italy and that was why she was blonde and not dark like most Italians. There was Swiss in her background, too.
We lived now in rural Tennessee, in the Hollows. I ran wild through the woods and knew every trail, deer hide, and copse for miles around the trailer. We were poor, but I didn’t know it until we had left my father. He was tall, dark-haired and eyed, with a quick temper that flashed most on Mom. She said he was Creole, from Louisiana and that was why he was so quick to jump on either of us. I had lived there until I was five and didn’t remember much of it, just the swamps he had taken me through to teach me about his childhood.
One day we just up and left, but she wouldn’t tell me why. But it was much harder for both of us after he was gone. Food was scarce, and I often walked to school with sneakers where the sole flapped and wearing a coat that was missing buttons, or the pockets had been torn off. I was always hungry until Mom took me out into the woods and showed me how to pick out the bounty that nature provided. I became quite the hunter, even made money selling the hides. What I didn’t know myself, I learned from reading at the library. It was one of the few places that I could hang out and not be chased, yelled at, belittled, or attacked. I loved the quiet stacks in the cool dim reaches of the old building. The ceilings were ten feet over my head and decorated with ornate plaster of Paris cornices and bric-a-brac. A true Victorian masterpiece. I only had to walk five miles into town to get to it or wait and hitch a ride with someone I trusted going that way.
Mom stood at the door of the trailer, so worn that I could see through the metal. Luckily, it didn’t get cold enough that hanging a blanket on the jamb during cold spells didn’t work. Her face was pale, paler than normal and she clutched the door jamb with white-knuckled fingers.
“Mom?” I asked, my heart pounding in my throat. “What’s the matter?” I looked down the thin path that led to the front of the junkyard.
“We have to leave,” she said abruptly. “It’s not safe here for you.”
“Did he come for the rent? I’ll have the rest for you in a few days,” I said. “I found some silver in an old car back under the dead trees. Sterling. I can pawn it, but I have to go to Taylorsville instead of Greentree.”
“Why?”
“The pawnbroker told me he can’t take any more stuff unless I can prove it belongs to me,” I shrugged.
“No, baby. That’s not why we need to leave.”
“Is it Dad? Is he coming here? How did he find us?”
I was panicking. The last time my father had been with us was the reason we had left town and a nice apartment for the rundown shithole we were in now. He beat mom and me, but the worst part was that he drank and when he had too much, he tried to pimp out both of us. The last time, I had broken a bottle over his head and knocked him into tomorrow. He’d thought he’d fallen into the corner of the staircase, or so he told the Sheriff Department when he reported us missing. We’d left on the bus that night and hitched until our money ran out, stopping in the tiny hamlet of Taylorsville where she’d found a job as a cleaning lady for the local motel on the highway.
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