Keeper, fiction by Scott Blackburn

Your eyes don’t leave the stoplight ahead.

You’re praying it turns green before I hold out a hand and ask for any change you can spare.

You might pity me. Maybe you judge me. What I bet you don’t realize is how thin the line is between you being in my shoes and me being in yours. A cardboard sign exchanged for that seven dollar latte in your cup holder.

Dominos fall fast.

A solid nine-to-five at the bus factory, to sports gambling with some guys on the assembly line, to you-need-to-call-a-helpline because you’re a goddamn gambling addict.

A two year bleed-out in my case.

Debts fermenting into desperation. Stealing a pocketful of cash from a locker at work. Hawking my nephew’s Playstation to cover what I owed some seedy fuckers who dealt in baseball bats and needle nose pliers.

I shut doors in my life. Some forever.

So maybe you can understand why I wake every day feeling the acid burn of guilt in my gut for the people I hurt. Maybe that guilt is why I’m doing what I do now. A penance I’m paying until I get myself back on two feet.

You can call me The Keeper.

It started when they shut down the big statuary place back in June. That was the only living business on what used to be a service road next to what used to be a highway. The quarter of a mile stretch is abandoned now, save for myself and a handful of others that started living at the old Fulton Motor Lodge at the end of that road. The place has been closed for a decade, but it’s a sight better than the shelter nearby where sickness runs wild, where the long nights are haunted with thieves and the howling voices of those that need far more than a roof over their heads and food in their bellies.

***

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my ten months on the streets, it’s this: folks with next to nothing can be real territorial. I guess that’s why it surprised me that a decency established itself at the motel. A you don’t fuck this up and I won’t fuck this up type of a thing.

But it was more than that. There were rules and responsibilities. There was a schedule. Some days we’d make runs to the food bank and the library, on others it was the laundr-o-mat and the little church on Elm where all those scriptures weren’t just relegated to folks’ bumper stickers.

Maybe I was being naive, but I started feeling downright optimistic about the whole thing, about my future. That should’ve been my first sign that a dark fucking cloud was about to roll in.

One Sunday evening, it sure as shit did.

It came wearing a badge; it came with an ultimatum: clear out by nightfall, or else.

After the sheriff gave those orders, I followed him out to his Bronco. I figured since I’d used my powers of persuasion for wrong in the past, I’d use them for good.

“You think you might want to reconsider this, Sheriff?”

He wheeled around, a fresh dip the size of a ping-pong ball stretching his lip. “I don’t remember stuttering. Next time I see any of you bums out here, I’ll take you in.”

“Half these people might prefer the digs at that nice jailhouse of yours,” I told him.

“I’ll make it quite uncomfortable, I can assure you. We ain’t in fucking Mayberry, and I ain’t Andy Griffith.”

It’s Andy Taylor, fuckwad, I thought, but didn’t say.

“How many more people do you want dying under your watch, Sheriff?”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“Overdoses,” I said. “I can name two in the past month. And don’t think I don’t know why the Exxon station over by the highway shut down. Best place to OD in the whole county.”

“You don’t know shit about my town.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Sheriff. Us bums are like high school janitors. We see things. We hear things.”

He took a step forward. “Most of those OD victims weren’t from around here. Pulled off to do their business at the nearest exit. Call it coincidence.”

“Coincidence or not, it still happened in your town. Maybe the coincidence is that it’s an election year.”

“The fuck are you getting at?”

I hooked a thumb toward the motel where people were gathering their things in bags and shopping carts. “We’ve been here for weeks and haven’t had a single bit of trouble. Sure as shit haven’t had anyone overdose. We look out for one another.”

“Well ain’t that fucking sweet?” he said. “You won’t be doing it here no more. Now get your ass moving or you’ll be the first I slap cuffs on.”

He spit, a stream of tobacco landing just inches from my shoes. He turned on a heel.

“You know, Sheriff, it’d be a real shame to ruin the reputation of your right hand man just weeks before you kick up your new campaign.”

He turned back, a little confused, a little like I’d thumped him in the nuts.

I went on: “Heard tell that Deputy Raines was called out to Big Jim’s truck stop a few weeks back. Something about a certain blonde trying to sell certain services to some truckers. Don’t you find it a little odd that Raines never brought her in?”

“How the hell—”

“I told you, Sheriff. We see things. We hear things. Especially at places we frequent—like a truck stop with public showers and seventy-nine cent coffee.”

“For your information, the suspect in question wasn’t there when Raines arrived. These lot lizards scatter like roaches when cops come near.”

“Sure looked like her leaving Big Jim’s in Raines’s cruiser that night. Kinda strange, ain’t it? You never seeing her arrive at your station. Sure wasn’t an arrest report in the paper. We do know how to read.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“Am I full of shit when I say your deputy has some distinguishing features on his—well, his, umm…billy stick? One that only his wife should know about, yet…”

The sheriff’s face turned redder than the sun that burned just over his shoulder.

“Nobody would believe a word of that story. Some hearsay from a bunch of goddamn vagrants versus an upstanding member of my department and the local church.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You don’t seem too surprised by it. If I learned anything in my gambling days it’s this: you best not take chances with stakes this big.”

“What do you want from me?”

“To let me keep an eye on these people. I’ll keep them out of your precious little downtown. Keep them from shooting fentanyl in their veins if I can help it. It’s a win-win, for both of us.”

He seemed to really consider my words. I could almost see campaign flyers and ballot boxes lighting his eyes like slot machines. “One fuck up and I’m shutting this down,” he finally said. “I’ll bring every damn one of you in. And I’m going to be checking in, making sure you’re holding up your end of the bargain. That includes keeping your mouths shut about that truck stop business: if even the hint of a rumor gets out about that, I’m coming for you.”

He stormed off all sweat, steam, and Skoal Longcut.

***

It’s been two months since then, and I’ve kept my end of the bargain.

The sheriff, who checks the rooms every few days, would never say it out loud, but I know he’s impressed by how things are going. I reckon folks having a routine in their lives, a place to call their own—even if it’s just for a little while—has made a difference.

A few of us have even found work. Washing windows and cleaning the local barbershop in the evenings isn’t much, but it’s something. Way I have it figured, I’ll be able to afford rent somewhere by spring.

Now, this might sound all good and well, but it’d be a damn lie if I told you the path to my new future didn’t come with some resistance. Just last week, another dark cloud rolled in.

This girl named Shanda had made a run to the food bank, and when she came back, she wasn’t alone. There was a young fellow with her that goes by Two-tone on account of this white streak he has in his crow black hair.

“I think we should give this kid a chance,” Shanda told me. “But you should know something: he’s got one hell of a rap sheet.”

“You tell him the rules?”

The rules:

Everybody pitches in.

No drugs.

No bullshit.

She nodded. “Says he’s clean now. Swears by it. I didn’t see any fresh track marks. Nothing like that. He just wants to stay here a few weeks until his girlfriend gets out of rehab.”

Those were big fucking red flags if you ask me, but given that most of us at the motel had run out of second chances in our own lives, we were willing to give this kid one.

Damn if Two-tone didn’t make me regret it.

Wasn’t but a few days after he moved in that somebody’s money went missing—in a room he’d visited that same afternoon. Of course he denied it all. Just like he denied swiping somebody’s food stash the very next day.

Two days later, I did a check on his room, something I’d started doing on Thursdays before the sheriff showed up to do his own check-in the next morning.

I was just about to give Two-tone a thumbs up when I found a needle he’d stashed under his mattress, a grimy-ass spoon next to it.

“The hell is this?” I asked him.

He knew I knew what the fuck it was. And while he didn’t look high at the moment, he got real fidgety. “It ain’t mine,” he told me, rubbing the back of his neck. “I swear it ain’t.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You know what’ll happen if the sheriff sees this?”

He swore again it wasn’t his—this time on God and his Mama. Went into some shit about helping a friend taper off heroin, like he was some opioid angel. I didn’t believe a damn word of it, and I had a mind to send him packing.

Call it grace, call it blind stupidity, but I took another chance on him.

***

Last night, I found Two-tone in room 9.

He was splayed out on his mattress, a needle hanging from his arm like some fifth limb. Unnatural and obscene.

The minutes that followed were a blur of panic—of decision.

I stood over his dead body. “You stupid fuck. You stupid, stupid fuck.” I kicked loose wrappers aside, a torn off cover from a Bible the Gideons had left a lifetime before. “You had people that gave a damn about you. People that gave you a chance when you didn’t fucking deserve it.”

You might think it vile, speaking ill of the dead like I did, but that son-of-a-bitch could’ve ruined things for everyone else. I could see it playing out: Sheriff Numbnuts grinning ear-to-ear as Two-tone was wheeled out on a gurney, grinning days later when my mugshot and five others stared from the newspaper. Laughing at the first-degree felony charges he’d have tagged us with for squatting.

Felonies. For no more than surviving in this forgotten annex.

So I did what I had to do.

Not just for me. For the others too.

I am The Keeper, after all.

The sheriff can never know what happened in room 9. How I wrapped Two-tone’s body in a moth-eaten blanket and dragged him out of the room in the dark of night. Dragged his body far, far into the woods.

And he can never know—nobody can ever know—that Two-tone still had a pulse when I found him. That I’d put two fingers on his neck to check.

How those fingers became two hands, squeezing, tighter and tighter.

Scott Blackburn is an English instructor and a 2017 graduate of the Mountainview MFA program. His debut novel, It Dies with You, released in 2022, and he has published short stories and poetry in magazines such as Dark Yonder, Deep South Magazine, and Red Weather. Scott lives in High Point, North Carolina with his wife and two children.