Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 22.

Shepherd Marshall of the end times!

Dawn of the final day. What’s an ending anyway?

Chapter 22. Shepherd Marshall of the end times!

The first two days aren’t so bad. He lets Jerry go first to show he is capable of goodwill and because Jerry’s whole deal confuses him, but already he has decided that he is not going to kill anyone. There is no moral dilemma, no but she indoctrinated me into a cult so maybe she deserves it. There is no internal argument. Sometime in the past day, Marshall just stopped being a person who can kill another human. He’s not capable of it anymore and he does not want to be. Marshall is kind because he wants to be, not violent because someone told him to be.

This of course puts him and the dozen cops camped out in the parking lot at a standstill.

Marshall doesn’t tell his hostages that they are not actually hostages.

Dick cooks three meals a day for them. They live in the kitchen now amongst all of the outdated appliances and dirty dishes where there are no windows. It also allows for easy slipping into the hallway to use the bathroom.

When he has to sleep, June takes over.

A turn of events! June came all the way to the diner from the decimated farm, not for her grandfather but to find Marshall. While he debated the ethics of turning your child into a patricidal killer over the phone with his mother, June had come on her metaphorical horse to tell of what she’d witnessed and what had changed the direction of her life forever: A revelation! A resurrection! A consecration!

The Three Mothers, wise as they are, had rejected their sacrifice, razed their homes to the ground with holy fire of biblical proportions. It was a message! A divine message, at that. The Three Mothers rejected Marshall because he is special. Something to be followed. Believed in. June’s eyes were opened to the truth. Shepherd Maya, a false prophet, was leading them into the darkness and she’d sealed their fate by trying to kill Marshall—not a sacrifice, but the true prophet! June experienced rebirth in the gospel of Marshall. She became a believer of Marshall. Shepherd Marshall of the end times.

What Dick took from this proclamation was that the guy using the landline in his restaurant had tried to kill his granddaughter and so he called the police. Blood relations mean little to June. In fact, she felt rather betrayed by her grandfather who had spent years dutifully sending wayward boys in the direction of Pleasant Farm, the ones most ripe for sacrifice. His eye for boys needing to be sacrificed was not a good one but he’d done well with Marshall! He’d found the true Shepherd! A prophet! That he would call the police on Marshall, wish to lock up the one who should show them through the world’s decline, well June found this blasphemous. So Marshall’s hostages instead became Marshall and June’s hostage and all the while, Marshall plans on doing nothing and leaving them both behind. They are, after all, very crazy in their own special ways and he does not care for them.

And so it is a hostage situation that cannot exactly be described as intense. Marshall is not worried about killing. June has found a new Shepherd. Dick is only sort of confused. Even the police don’t seem very concerned about the situation at hand as though they’d much rather be somewhere else doing little to actually help anyone. The fates of two black hostages in rural Missouri don’t mean much to them but it’s good overtime to keep their cars parked out front, call every few hours just to check in.

This is somehow less often than June checks in. On the first day, Marshall was forced to consider killing her out of sheer frustration. “I had a gut feeling about you, Shepherd,” she’d said far too close to his ear to not be whispering, huddled on the floor by some haphazard bags of pale burger buns. “I knew the false Shepherd would try to sacrifice you and the Mothers would reject the sacrifice and all would be proven righteous in the eyes of each beholder, this was spoken to me.”

“Right,” Marshall had said, fingering a wide crack in the laminate floor. He got the impression that if he kept burrowing into that fissure, it might widen and offer a way out. Just a feeling.

“The doubters and the nonbelievers, of course they form ranks, woven together by their faithlessness,” she went on. “This is the nature of broken hope, enough loud dissenters and the cracks seem to be filled by their own delusion, the size of it grand enough to convince anyone of their own falsitudes.”

“Okay,” Marshall had said.

“But the Mothers, gracious and yet withholding in their wisdom, they reveal the truth where they can and your arrival was of course timely, it had a significance that I’m sure you didn’t miss because of course they spoke to you as well of the larger plan, I could see it in your patience on the pyre awaiting not an end but a miracle! It was brave, Shepherd, the trust you placed in the Holy Three to deliver you from harm and toward your place at the head of the flock.”

Marshall smacked his lips. “June, I don’t believe in mothers,” he said. “Mothers are fallible like everyone else. They lie and they fail. Hurt and mislead. They got their own shit going on. Wherever your Three Mothers are, they aren’t watching. They don’t give a fuck. All we’ve got is each other, understand?”

The crack in the floor seemed to expand like a tentative breath. June blinked at him, eyes wide. “Shepherd…of course! We have each other, what brilliance! And furthermore…” She went on this way for some time inventing bible verses on the spot upon which to prop her delusions. Marshall listened dutifully, while banging his head rhythmically against the bar begging silently for her to stop. She said some important stuff, too, chiefly that Shepherd Maya’s real name was Kayleigh and she was in fact not indigenous but from California by way of a large Italian family possessing a sizable fortune that funded most of Pleasant Farm’s expenses. The shrooms had been imported. From a dispensary. Marshall tried really hard to care about this information but it hardly came as a surprise that the lying cult leader had been lying the whole time and he had more important things on his mind like how to get the fuck out of this hostage situation and ditch June at the same time.

After two days of this, Marshall’s plan of riding it out until the cops get bored and leave is not looking very promising and neither is his commitment to never committing homicide again.

Today is the third day. Marshall’s back is sore from sleeping on a bag of potatoes. He has his backpack and so he’s been brushing his teeth but he can feel them rotting from the sweetness of the constant breakfast food he keeps ordering.

Though he’s comfortable dragging out this situation for as long as is necessary, June is getting antsy. When Marshall doesn’t give her anything to do, she goes into the bathroom and plucks out her hairs from her scalp one by one. The bathroom trash can is turning into a staticky black void. She questions everything, but her sudden reverence for Marshall does not allow her to argue in any influential sort of way. She’s plucking out her hairs now, her murmuring voice drifting through the open bathroom door and Marshall is sitting on the hard tile floor with Dick.

Marshall is content with scratching and sniffing his balls, doodling on the backs of napkins, agreeing silently with himself about the uselessness of the police, but Dick is looking at him like he’s gotta talk soon or he’ll get sick. So Marshall succumbs.

“Was she always like this? June?”

Dick considers this. He’s got a slight tic in his right eye so it looks like the thought of his granddaughter disgusts him a bit. “Not always, no. She used to want things for herself. Lots of things, actually. She wanted to be a dancer, an engineer, an architect, a news anchor. She was full of big aspirations.”

“What happened?”

Dick tugs at the strings on his apron. “Nothing. Or something…her parents–my beautiful girl and her husband–died in Hurricane Katrina. June was…she wandered, you know? She was just a baby and no one came to find her so she walked through rivers and over downed trees until she found someone and they told her where to go. But even then, when I brought her up here to live with me and I was raising her, she seemed alright. Well-adjusted.” He shrugs. “I don’t know what changed. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Marshall isn’t sure how to tell Dick that he’s not much more in control of his life or actions any more than June is. He’s somehow even lower than her, scoping out his customers for potential cult members, sending them her way. He doesn’t have to think about what happens to them once they leave this place, doesn’t have to consider his hand in their indoctrination and live sacrifice. Maybe it’s him. Maybe there’s a broken thing in him that led June down this path, the worst of all her aspirations.

“You know,” Marshall says, “I had big dreams too. Haven’t thought about them in a minute.”

“Yeah? This wasn’t your vision of a future?”

Marshall laughs. “Oh, no. The future is…well I never thought about the future much, at least not one with me in it. I never expected to live this long. But I had fantasies. Like, maybe there was some alternate universe version of Marshall living by the seaside painting the days away. Got a dog and a garden out back. Self-sustaining. And all I do is make art and look at trees and stuff.”

“And you all alone in this dream? No one there with you?”

Marshall opens and closes his mouth. “Guess not. Never could see myself around someone for that long. Everyone stops lovin’ you after too long.”

Dick grunts. “Maybe that’s been true, but it ain’t always. There are always people whose gonna love you no matter what. If I can love my crazy cult granddaughter despite everything, I think there must be someone who could love your big ass too.”

Maybe there could have been. But that’s all over. Hard as he’s tried, all of his looping lazy thoughts keep circling back to what he’s lost. Lana, Jamie, the kid. He didn’t think he could miss something so much. Nothing had ever been worth missing before, but Lana’s cutting voice, Beaver’s dry wit, Jamie’s gentle touch and understanding eyes, the memory of them is circling him still like hungry seagulls pecking at his vulnerability. But he still wants to live. Despite everything, his thirst for life is strong and he’ll do it all on his own if he has to. Find some remote seaside village, somewhere up in Canada like they’d planned. Adopt a dog, start a garden, paint away his days, paint until it’s all over. That’s the plan.

The phone rings then. Once and then twice and then three times. June’s balding head appears in the doorframe. “Can I get that?”

“No,” is Marshall’s curt reply. She backs down.

He crawls across the floor to where the phone is on the floor behind the bar. “Yello?” He answers.

“Hey, kid.” The hostage negotiator. He sounds bored. “Got some people out here that wanna come in and talk you down. Say they’re friends of yours.”

Marshall’s heartbeat trips over itself. “Who?”

“Girl with big hair and some brown guys.”

In his excitement and disbelief, Marshall nearly jumps over the counter to catch sight of them—but he stops himself. The police are bored, but they definitely wouldn’t mind shooting him in the head. Might even be fun for them. But there’s no way. Are they really here? Did they come back for him?

“Yeah,” he replies with nonchalance, “you can send them in.”

“Deal is, they come in, you send a hostage out.”

He doesn’t hesitate. “June! Get out of here.”

She tries to argue but he insists it is required, a thing that has been spoken to him. If she does not go out and allow his friends to come in, they will not survive the flames and destruction that are coming, of this he is sure, etc. Speaks her language. June didn’t bring anything with her but she makes a show of gathering herself before she slides around the corner in full view of the windows, the police vans, the FBI and all the snipers. The door rings as she exits, some muffled sound from the parking lot. Another ring and Marshall holds his breath. Resists the tingling in his legs. He believes it and does not believe it. How could anyone love him that much?

“Hey, Shall.”

He looks up. It’s Beaver’s head, looking down at him over the edge of the bar. His helmet falls off and bonks Marshall’s noggin.

“Hey, John Beaver.” He tries not to cry but it’s already happening. A sob catches in his throat. He pulls his legs close to his chest. He cannot believe it. How could anyone love him that much?

Beaver slides over the counter, drops down and sits on the cold floor with his compact adolescent body pushed against Marshall’s. He laughs and it comes out like a wail. Lana rounds the corner. Rolls her eyes and sits down with him, head resting on Marshall’s shoulder. The hairs on his arms stand up in salute. He squeezes his eyes shut tight to hold back the tears but he’s a bursting dam and he keeps them shut anyway because he doesn’t want to know. If Jamie came back. If he’s worthy of that kind of love. How could anyone love Marshall that much?

A set of sweet warm lips press into his forehead. Slim arms around his waist, a weight in his lap. Jamie takes a finger and traces it in aimless loops around the nape of his neck. It is a silent, clear thing that he says in a language only the two of them can understand: I love you that much and so much more.

Marshall’s body shudders as the grief of being deeply loved moves into his hulking frame and something is exorcized. A deep, original shame shakes loose from his chest. Something is closed and another thing opened. The people who love Marshall pull him in close and they breathe with his breath and they don’t say anything but their silence says all that needs to be said: you are safe. We are here. There is no end, we go on and on and on.

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