Continued from Part Three.

Yeti emerged from his slumber around noon, disheveled and confused. A mass of man, chin, and fur.

“When did you get here?” He said.

“You let me in.”

“Oh.”

The first floor apartment was small and dim. I sat up in the wan light and pushed aside space for my feet. Stacks of girlie mags like Oui, Chic, and Juggs squatted on every possible surface. The floor was strewn with beer cans.

Yeti had told me a story about how he had woken up one morning covered in blood and thought he killed someone until he went into the kitchen and saw a murder scene–he had cooked a pot roast, blood rare, in the wee hours of the night after a night of drinking. Too drunk to bother with a fork and knife, he had picked and ripped at the beef with his bare hands, then fallen asleep.

He showered first and I followed after he finished. My first blast of warmth in some time. I had slept in my clothes, shivering on his old, gross couch. A new man. Fresh undies and socks! I hadn’t felt hot water since the hotel back in Vermont. I wondered what the hell I was doing. I thought for a moment about the Ex, my first love, now far away across two states. It was over forever.

The first love was always the worst one to get over. The worst heartbreak because it was uncharted territory and all the chips were pushed in. It’s sad that our hearts harden as we age. Even after we had split and she had moved home, I still thought some chance remained. After this most recent encounter, I truly realized it was over. A new guy for her. The open road for me.

The plan was to go visit our two buddies from high school and watch some football. They lived just a few hours away in Frederick, Maryland. We both bundled up and went out into the early Pennsylvania afternoon. The first stop was breakfast. We walked for a bit in Carlisle, a place resembling my own home. A small, college town where many of the nice old houses were converted into apartments for students.

We hit the closet breakfast joint and had eggs, toast, some coffee, then spent a good hour wandering the snowy, desolate streets for Yeti’s car. He had been at some party, somewhere. We finally found his old Subaru parked with one wheel up on the curb. We climbed in. A half full bomber of beer sat in the front cupholder. He grabbed the bottle, opened the driver’s side door, dumped the remainder into the street, then casually discarded the empty on the back floorboards behind him.

He drove me to my car at his place and I followed him out of Carlisle. A quiet little area, a quiet little afternoon. Through the streets, out onto the highway, through a small stretch of the Gettysburg battlefields where Yeti pulled off to the side once to retch before we continued on.

To say I felt a strange, ghostly presence while driving down those old roads, the battlefields on either side, would be an understatement. The deaths, the existence of extreme misery and violence, were palpable. Mists lingered out there in the fields like effects from a movie. It seemed odd to be able to drive through all of it as if the laying of asphalt roads on top of the blood soaked earth was disrespectful to all the people who had lost their lives. I imagined the tens of thousands of men out there shooting muskets in lines, running at one another with bayonets. The swamp of fallen bodies. The canvas tents with the wounded. The gunpowder smoke in the air. The shouts, the screams.

I felt something different in the air after passing over the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, like entering a different country entirely. All in my mind, of course, but it was as far south as I had been on my own. The south owned a mystique. In my mind at that time, a historically and currently backward part of the country. A place with strict laws along with an inescapable weight of the past.