It Had to be Him

I saw him crossing a busy street in downtown Hamilton, Ontario. He was sauntering in his typically casual yet threatening swagger. As usual he seemed to be tempting the oncoming vehicular traffic to take him out. I knew immediately it had to be him.

His gait was just as I would have expected of him. He moved slowly and gracefully as though he might have once been a ballet dancer, which he never was. His calf muscles flexed into tight sinewy balloons with every step he took. And as always, he moved into each new stride by pushing off from his toe tips of his opposite foot propelling himself not only forwards but also upwards. It had to be him.

An extra long cigarette dangled from his thick and protruding lower lip. His cigarettes did not need to be compressed between upper and lower lips. They just sat fixed to his lower lip by his own saliva as if pinned there like a poppy to a lapel. He could quickly retract his cigarette whenever he needed to inhale his next lungful of toxic air. It just had to be him.

It had to be him except…except his shoulder length hair still seemed to be as naturally strawberry blonde as it was thirty-five years ago. Certainly no dye job could be that good.

It had to be him except...except his forearms and biceps were as toned and prominent as they were when he was in his early twenties, doing one-arm chinups. Today he would be on the dark side of sixty.

It had to be him except…except Johnny Parcush had died in a traffic accident, more than a thousand miles from here and thirty-five years ago. That’s right, he died thirty-five years ago. I should know.

I slammed on my car brakes and just missed hitting Johnny’s right leg as it lingered momentarily in the flow of traffic on King Street. I did not blast my horn as that is exactly what Johnny Parcush would have wanted thus empowering him to turn and face the oncoming traffic. I knew his shtick well. He would flip the bird with both hands towards any driver who might be watching him. It was his well-known aggressive and rude repertoire.

His legs would bend and then bow out at the knees. His shoulders would slouch and his eyes would glare with outrageous rage through their narrow openings as his two nicotine-stained middle fingers quickly popped up threateningly.

As I hit my brakes hard, my cell phone flew out of my right hand and crashed into the windshield. Its battery popped loose and ricocheted back to hit me square between the eyes. I was about to inhale deeply on my own cigarette and I damn near sucked it in and swallowed it whole. The extra-large coffee held in my left hand, as I navigated the steering with my knees, spilled its scalding liquid hit of caffeine right into my lap. At least the airbag didn’t employ.

I wondered how it could be possible that, on this patch of pavement and so far from home, Johnny Parcush and I once again came face to face. I jumped out of my car right there on King Street.

“Johnny Parcush !!” I shouted. “Johnny Parcush, stop.”

Johnny turned his head slightly towards me. Not far enough to make direct eye contact but enough for me to be able to see that the slits of his beady eyes had popped wide open at the calling of his name. He took off down a side street like a bat out of hell. His usual threatening and defiant stance, I suppose, was not so tough after all if challenged. He ran like a scared coyote through a crowd of noon hour pedestrians.

I took off after Johnny Parcush, holding my hand to my scalding balls and leaving my vehicle abandoned in the right-hand lane of King Street. I wondered why Johnny was running away from me. All I wanted to do was apologize for killing him in that freakish accident thirty-five years ago.

Wait a minute! Why did I want to apologize to him? The bastard, I see now, wasn’t freaking dead after all and I had spent five years in jail for vehicular homicide relating to his death. I picked up the pace of my pursuit. I continued to hold my groin as I ran but I knew that what I really wanted now was to have Johnny’s own balls in a vice grip.

           It didn’t take long for me to catch up to Johnny Parcush even with his apparently enduring youthful agility and strength. When your groin is searing in pain, as was mine from the spilled hot coffee, one can actually feel some relief in chasing down the hunted. The harder I ran in pursuit of Johnny P., the quicker relief seemed to settle in. With that incentive I was on Johnny P. in less than a minute.

           “Johnny !!” I screamed into his ear as I caught up to him. “What the hell are you doing here….alive!” And right there in the plaza in front of a noontime lunch crowd, I laid him out with a spectacular and dirty horse-collar tackle.

           Johnny P. let out an ear-piercing scream as he fell to the ground under my weight. “Let go of my balls!” he screamed. “Let go of my damn balls!”

           I squeezed harder.

           After his third cry for relief, I released my groin grip. The groping, quite frankly, wasn’t doing anything for me either. I continued to impose my fifty-pound weight advantage upon his prone body so that he would not run off again. I wheezed too heavily and gasped for breath too deeply, to be able to start asking the questions that needed to be addressed.

Johnny P. asked the questions instead. His questions came at me like a woodpecker on a tree trunk.

           “Who are you?” he shouted. “How did you know my name? Where do you come from? Are you from New Bruswick? Are you from Edmonton? Are you with the Feds? Are you with the freaking Feds!?”     

           “Whoa” I shouted at him, trying to ebb his flow. “Yeah I’m from New Brunswick” I replied. “I am the guy who killed you there. What the hell gives, Johnny?”

           Johnny Parcush stunned me once again as he turned his head a full one hundred and eighty degrees from being face down on the concrete to look me square in the eyes. His head seemed to be detached of all ligaments. He knew immediately, in spite of my physical aging, just who it was that was sprawled on top of him in downtown Hamilton.

           “It’s a long story” said Johnny P. “I’m a freak of nature. Let me up and we’ll talk.”

           I rolled off of him but continued to grip his shirt collar tight enough that his face reddened. I couldn’t afford to have him run off.

Through his constricted throat Johnny P. told me his preposterous story.

He took me back to New Brunswick, to 1981, to the scene where I had hit him accidently with my car and knocked him over the railing into the freezing Miramichi River. It was there and then that he realized he was catlike and possibly had nine lives.

He had been pronounced dead at the scene of that accident, after his lifeless body was hauled off the river bank. He was sent to the city morgue where he lay on a refrigerated slab for two more days. Thankfully, his wife had refused an autopsy.

At some point, after his body had then been delivered to a funeral home, his near discernable heart rate began to self-regulate and he miraculously rose from the dead. It was at that funeral home where Johnny P. concocted a devious plan in cahoots with his no longer grieving wife and the stunned embalmer who witnessed Johnny’s revival.

           The plan was set. Johnny P.’s missus claimed the $500,000 insurance payment on his life. The embalmer laid to rest an empty casket and the three of them shared in the insurance pay-off. Johnny left town under the cover of darkness and was later followed by his assumed-to-be-mourning wife. He changed his identity, took out another insurance policy and started life anew, as a rich man, in a far-off city.

 It would not be the only time that Johnny P. got killed. Once he realized his state of immortality, he staged a few more car-takes-out-pedestrian ‘deaths’. Just as he was attempting here in Hamilton on this day, he had made a habit of tempting vehicles to hit him and to hit him hard. On a good day he would be killed.

His wife always played an accomplice in the scams and after they collected further insurance payouts, they both moved on, always assuming new identities and always leaving a wealthy embalmer in their wake.

“After New Brunswick,” said Johnny proudly, “I’ve been killed in Edmonton, Boise, Idaho and Atlantic City. I was setting up the next ploy right here in Hamilton. Man are the drivers here ever crazy.”

“This is unbelievable, Johnny” I said while trying to allow myself to trust the validity of his story. Seeing him here in the living flesh, converted me from a skeptic to a believer in the implausibility. I couldn’t deny the truth. “And you haven’t aged a day in the thirty-five years since I killed you in New Brunswick.”

“Yeah, pretty cool, eh?” said Johnny P. as he lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply through his constricted throat. “And I smoke three packs a day.”

“Why don’t you call it quits to your scam?” I asked. “Don’t you fear you might run out of lives? Aren’t you rich enough yet?”

“I have no fear,” said Johnny. “I am buzzed by both the embezzlement and the escape. You can’t imagine the elation of being struck by a vehicle and not feeling any pain what-so-ever. You can’t fathom the rush of having your heart slowly rev up from two beats every few minutes and go back to regularity. And the sensation of broken bones almost instantly re-adhering to themselves. Far out, man.

“Oh, I do have to fake my love for the wife if you know what I mean. She looks so much older than me but I need her to complete our scams. Trust me, If I could find a way, I’d do it alone.”

I wound up and punched Johnny P. smack on the tip of his nose. I hit him so hard he fell back and banged his head on the concrete. I stood up and kicked him in the rib cage and dropped a knee into his chest. He just lay back and smiled at me and took a drag on his cigarette. I guess the only pain he had felt was when I had grabbed his balls earlier. Who wouldn’t feel that?

“Thanks. I needed that” I said to Johnny Parcush after laying him out on the concrete. I rubbed my knuckles. “It helps relieve some of the anger I’ve endured for having spent five years in jail for no bloody reason.

“But you know something, Johnny P?” I continued. “Now that I am on to your devious scheme and along with the fact that you are well aware of the depth of the debt that you owe me, I think you and I will be enjoying a beautiful and enriching friendship.”

Johnny’s eyes squinted.

“Let’s call your wife,” I said smirking. “And let’s get started, shall we? Pick a good place to die, Johnny.”