Suicide in Slow Motion–“Pamplona”

by Reagan Pettigrew

The following is an excerpt from veteran author, Reagan Pettigrew’s novel, Suicide in Slow Motion.

That night, I heard Mr. Gold screaming in his sleep. At first, when the screaming began, I stood over him and watched him, feeling sorry. I reached out to him to wake him, but something in me wanted to also grab his pillow and begin smothering him. I imagined his arms flailing and his sausage fingers clawing at the air, and me in all the commotion wondering whether deep down he’d thank me and think of it as a kindness for putting him out of his misery. I didn’t do any of that; instead, I just gave him a light shake. Mr. Gold shuddered and woke up bleary-eyed and embarrassed.

“Was I having one of my Black Sleeps?” Mr. Gold asked.

I sat down next to him and laughed.  “What do you mean?”

“Oh, you can shove it where the sun don’t shine,” Mr. Gold said. “I have night terrors sometimes.” He reached under his bed for his flask and took a nip, then removed his blanket revealing a full set of gray long johns and a pair of white and red-striped runners’ socks on his feet.

“I like your outfit,” I said with a smile.

“Don’t give me shit, boy,” Mr. Gold said while he laced up his shoes.

“Damn,” he said, wriggling his toes back and forth. “They don’t have it in them today.”

“Do you have a lot of bad dreams?” I asked, exposing my pink and white toes to the air, and filling the room with the scent of decaying flesh.

“I don’t like that smell!” Mr. Gold grumbled as he held his nose in disgust.

“Why?” I asked.

“I said I don’t like the smell,” Mr. Gold yelped and stood up and twisted toward me, snapping to attention as he pointed at me with his hand in the shape of a sword, “Feet go in socks, which go in shoes. That’s the way it works. Here,” he said, throwing me a small bottle of talcum powder. ”You need to take care of the things that take care of you.” Mr. Gold shook inside himself, like there was a whole world of conversations swirling about his head, and I was an idiot for not being privy to any of them. He gnashed his teeth, then pulled out a map and slapped it against his hands. “Look here!” he said, showing me the map. “We ought to do a forty-mile day today. There’s nothing but deserts and plains in front of us after the mountain outside Pamplona. We’ll be free and clear. Smooth as grease.”

I was in a bit of a quandary as I didn’t want to rile him up, but I was getting pulled deeper into his tunnel, and the more I looked at him going on, the more I began to hear a ringing in my ears. Finally, I said, “Sure, why not.”

“Fantastic, wonderful!” Mr. Gold said.

We stepped outside into the early morning. The silence in the town was almost palpable; I was sure I could have heard a pin drop three blocks over. Only the slight burn of the streetlamps could be heard and the tap-tapping of our shoes along the cobblestone road. There was a touch of fog on the streets, which didn’t so much as limit my vision, but create a hazy backdrop for what I felt on the inside.

We couldn’t get food as none of the cafés were open.

“Maybe we’ll have luck in the next town,” Mr. Gold said.

“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t really believe it. I was convinced that somehow our fighting in that church had cursed our adventure, and negated any loss I had gone through in my life; God wouldn’t be pulling any punches now after the spectacle we had put on for him. We had lost our Camino magic.

“Give me a cigarette, would you sir,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Mr. Gold said.

I lit it and felt the burn go into my lungs and breathed it out into the fog; I could not tell where my breath ended and the fog started. But still, we walked on, and the haze cleared and in front of us stood the Plaza De Toros Coliseum. Mr. Gold tried to secretly nip at his flask. I pretended not to notice. “That’s the thing of the old world,” Mr. Gold said. “They love to memorialize Death, don’t they? They like to sit and steep in it like chili. That’s why America is so great. We don’t stew in our tragedies; we forget them and move on.”

I looked at Mr. Gold, inhaled deeply on my cigarette, and wondered whether he felt as low as I did. I looked down the road thinking that he probably didn’t and began to go numb and let my mind rattle and reel and drift away.

The road appeared to dissipate into nothingness. I had no idea where I was in the city. It was like being in a pinball machine from hell, pinging and ponging through the yellow arrows as I disconnected and disassociated into the free and clear spaces of my mind. I remembered the beach in Panama, and Jacob sitting atop his surfboard. Isolated with the setting sun and storm blowing in offshore. He was beautiful and dead, and I wondered whether he had known all along how far gone he was? Did he know what awaited him at home? I didn’t believe that. Not really, instead I thought suicide was more like a ship roaming farther and farther from the shore without a compass, hoping to make it to the other side. Looking for any port that would shelter it in the storm.

Before long, we were standing in a store, in a town at the base of the mountain outside Pamplona. Mr. Gold stammered and became more and more frustrated with a woman behind the counter for not having anything stronger than wine or beer. She was a tall woman with big shoulders and long, flowing black hair. She reminded me of a giant towering over mere mortals and if she so chose, she could reach over and with a fist and smash Mr. Gold into the ground like a toon character. I could almost imagine the tweety birds.

“Just give me a bottle,” Mr. Gold ordered.

“You’re going a little hard on that drink there, sir.”

“Don’t worry about me boy; you’ll know when I’m on a bender. It’s just my knee, starting to feel a little inflamed.”

“Peregrino,” the woman said to me. “There is not water for thirty kilometers and the sun is high. Be careful.” I thanked her for her words and left the shop with Mr. Gold angrily in tow.

He’s vile, I thought.

The mountain was small and crafted of red clay. I imagined a sort of rock giant lifting sand and dirt from one part of the world to another and smashing it down with a big fist like a child would build a sandcastle. The earth around me swirled into mini dust devils, which danced and bounced along the path and then jumped off the side of the cliff and disappeared into nothing.

I noticed my knees felt weaker as I walked higher; they still hadn’t warmed up. I stopped and massaged my left knee, and then my right and heard Mr. Gold huffing and puffing behind me. I didn’t want to start a conversation, so I began moving even faster up the hill.

When I reached the top, I pondered the “Parting Glass.” A verse reminded me of Mr. Gold, and how irritable he seemed. “Of all the money that e’er I had, I spent it in good company. And all the harm I’ve ever done. Alas, it was to none but me.”

There were steel cutouts at the top of the mountain in the shape of pilgrims and donkeys and cyclists. They twisted back and forth in the wind, and when I placed my hand on one, a touch of rust rubbed off onto my fingers. The cutouts were like a keyhole into another dimension as I caught a glimpse of Pamplona at rest behind them. I wondered whether anyone knew I was here, whether I was looking at them, or even whether I existed.

Mr. Gold came up behind me and told me to not look so somber. He rested his hands on his knees and took deep breaths of air.

“Your generation has never really had anything bad happen to it, but the signs of it are all around you. Terrible! Biker gangs, priests molesting boys, and dogs living and hobbling all around the town,” he said, pointing back to the city. Mr. Gold told me a story of his childhood. Back then, his people believed in revolution and experimentation. In his eyes, the people in the US had nothing to believe in but money.

I quoted the “Parting Glass” again, ignoring his rant as I was determined to stay focused on the beauty around me: “But since it fell into my lot. That I should rise and you should not. I’ll gently rise and softly call. Good night and joy be with you all.”

Mr. Gold smirked and said, “Poems are for sad people. Music is for those who have heart and believe the truth. Maria understood that extremely well. She used to twirl with the flowers, but then my little Flower began to wilt.” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I looked away from Mr. Gold’s sharp eyes at a woman who was selling sodas and beers from a cart. She had bottles on strings that were connected to an awning, and she was chanting in Spanish, “Beers and desserts!”

“It was in here,” Mr. Gold said, pointing to his head. “I looked away and she slipped through my fingers.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. But I didn’t mean it; I just said it because I figured it was the right thing to do. Really, I wanted to figure out why he was telling me this now. Mr. Gold sauntered down the road and I looked back at the cutouts and saw three crows standing atop them, and a hopeful feeling sprang up in me when I heard Jacob’s voice telling me to not stand here any longer and to keep moving.

Hours later, Mr. Gold and I wandered into a local bar. There were pilgrims inside. Mr. Gold hadn’t spoken one word to me since the top of the mountain, but now it was like a switch suddenly turned on. He became excited, yelling, “I’ve got the next round, brother,” to a traveler from Colorado. Mr. Gold’s smile was huge and loud, and his face wrinkled like leather when he laughed. Mr. Gold’s cavalier attitude reminded me too much of my father, so much so that I imagined my father’s mustache on Mr. Gold’s face.

He thanked a young woman for lighting his cigarette and gazed at her expectantly. I took a seat down in the corner and hated him from afar. I wanted to yell and shout and say the truth to everyone. It’s all a lie, it’s all an act, I screamed inside my mind.

A short rather petite waitress with stubby fingers and wide hips walked up to Mr. Gold to take his order. “I’ll take a paella and a cerveza, and give the boy the same,” Mr. Gold said, gesturing at me. The waitress fluttered away like a bird running from the ocean.

I noticed that the inside of the bar was cut out from rock. It looked like a cave and was cooled against the one-hundred-and-twenty-degree heat. Mr. Gold consumed beer after beer while singing “King of The Road” with the traveler from Colorado.

Mr. Gold finished his fourth beer and laughed. “Y’all wanna know what the secret of life is? The secret is nothing.”

Everyone laughed.

We left the bar an hour later and managed to reach mile thirty-two just before the sun set. Through a clearing, I noticed that Mr. Gold had begun to drag his feet as the booze and the heat sapped his will and motivation. He was approximately forty feet behind me when I turned around to take a look at him. His body language was that of a defeated man who knew he had to give up on his mission of forty miles in one day. Mr. Gold dropped his head in failure. “Do you think we could stop there for the night?” he asked in an exhausted voice, pointing with his walking stick at a small stone building that was approximately one hundred feet off the trail. It had a single window through which we could make out a natural, glowing light in the center of the wall. “I don’t know what it is, but maybe we could rest there for a bit?”

I half tilted my head up so my voice would travel to him. “Sure. Let’s go; I’m bushed, too.”

We hurried carefully through the wheat field. The stems smacked us in the groin and got into our eyes and mouths; I might have laughed at the absurdity of it all had I not been so tired. Mr. Gold moved like a ghost, almost like the wheat was sacred or something.

The building had a rod iron gate, and upon entering, we found that it was a church. Mr. Gold’s head dropped and he told me half under his breath that he would sleep outside. ”My jaw still hurts,” he said with a slight smile as he rubbed his cheek.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “It may rain.”

Mr. Gold tapped his stick into the ground twice with a slight twist and sighed. “No, no, it’s fine,” he said.

“I can sleep in the corner,” I said. But he waved me off.

“No, that’s fine, son; you hit the hay, and I’ll stay outside.”

I dropped my pack inside the church on the sanded floor. “Mr. Gold,” I shouted through the window.

“Yeah?” he chirped back, his voice echoing through the cutout.

“How do you deal with it?” I called.

“With what?” Mr. Gold asked.

I looked at the wall and a lump grew in my throat.

“I feel like hell all the time.”

“I don’t,” he said. “I drink or I pray.” His flask flew through the window and landed on the ground. I picked it up and took off the cap. Licorice and scents of wormwood washed into my nose.

“I don’t drink absinthe anymore,” I said.

“Take a nip and get some sleep,” he ordered. I sat and looked at the flask and then shoved it into my backpack.

The church was a simple place. Stone walls, dirt and sand floors, a stone cutaway cross etched into the wall on the farthest side of the room, and a stone table full of trinkets, bushels of rosemary, sage, loose tobacco, cigars, wine, pens, and burning candles. I looked at them all and wondered at their sentimental value. What memories did they unleash, and what pains did they balm?

Gently, I picked up the rosemary, brought it to my nose, and breathed in its unique, pungent fragrance­—thinking of the three Saint mountains close to my home. Their trails were wet and saturated with the aromas of pine needles. The switchbacks along the spines of the mountains had witnessed my last adventures with Jacob, and I remembered the cold winter chill only too well. The frost of the Baldy Bowl at San Antonio in the early morning. Boulders the size of houses crashing from its peak. Cooking food at night in small jet pods on Telegraph Peak. The wind howled, ripping my tent to shreds.

While I was alone in the church, I took off my shoes and jacket. My bare feet felt fragile, like clay pigeons at a shooting range. I felt numb. Rudderless. Sad. So, I sat down to pray. Like Elijah had taught me. All the while, I listened to the things that floated through my mind.

I had carried this pain for so long, perhaps even to the point that I had become used to it. Maybe my eyes had not deceived me with Jacob, maybe I had known he was sailing too far from the shore, maybe I had seen the drinking, maybe I had seen him saying goodbye when he sang, maybe I had known all along that he was going away? Or maybe it was all in my mind. And maybe, I was just used to pain, so I continued it because it was all I knew?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an older-looking woman wearing a black shawl over her head and shoulders come in through the gate. As I wiped away my tears, I noticed gray peppering through her hair and tiny black freckles dotted over her cheeks. She carried a wicker basket in hand and exuded a warmness about her person as she stepped into the candlelight. She is a saint, I thought to myself, as she placed two candles, a hunk of sage wrapped in twine, and an abalone shell from her basket on the floor. Then she sat down herself, still ignoring my presence, and poured herself a cup of tea from a thermos. After taking a sip, she spat it on the floor, made a symbol in the sand, and then clenched her fist, bringing her hand to her heart and then letting it go into the air with an open palm.

I scooted backward so as not to disturb her, and for the first time, she turned and looked at me.

“Peregrino?”

“Si, I mean yes, yes I am.”

“Your face,” she said, touching her cheek just below the eye. “You look pain.”

“I am sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“Why do you say this?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m being rude by being here and I don’t want to disturb you.”

“Chico Triste,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “Come sit down next to me.” She patted the ground with an open palm in invitation, as if she was pressing energy into the ground itself. I joined her and sat with my legs crossed, but she did not look at me as I sat beside her. Instead, she kept her head straight and faced the table. There was a sternness about her now, but as I stared at her, I could see her underlying beauty in the light.

“Be silent, Chico Triste.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Your stare is too loud. Drink!” she ordered, handing me a cup of tea. “It is good medicine.” I thanked her and she began to light her sage and cup the smoke as it smoldered off the bushel. Her fingers massaged around her hair and her lips, and she streamed the tips of her fingers delicately along her throat.

She handed me the cup and told me to do the same.

“What is this?” I asked in curiosity.

“Just do,” she ordered.

I copied her, massaging my hair with the smoke, running my fingers along my lips, and then streaming my throat, but she could sense my reluctance and took the shell from me.

“You carry too much with you,” she said. ”Carry only what you can.”

“I don’t understand.”

The woman stood up, grabbed my pack, flung it outside the church, and locked the gate behind her. I asked her what she was doing, and wondered whether she meant to harm me, and whether I would be fine with killing an old woman.

“Stand!!” she ordered with her arms open. “I want you to yell.”

Her lips parted and her scream echoed about the walls.

“You!”

I felt silly and nervous like I was standing naked in front of the crew on ship.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You understand nothing, Chico Triste. Why do you walk?”

I closed my eyes and my chin shrunk down and a pain welled deep inside my chest, and my hands seized the inside of my pockets. I thought of Elijah and Esme, the mountains, Jacob, my father, Talia, and the sea—none of it gave me strength. Instead, it was the opposite. The more I thought about the past, the more it hurt, and the weaker I felt. She repeated her question, this time more kindly than the last.

“I don’t see.”

“You don’t see? It is not true. Open your eyes!” I opened them as requested. “Do you know of the flying spiders?” she queried. “They jump from the trees to catch flies.”

“I have seen them,” I said.

“The flies become caught, yes, but they are of the forest, and have every way to escape the spider. They can break free from their bonds by using the trees, but they don’t. They stay stuck. But they can fly.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You must see everything, Chico Triste. See the moon and stars and know every branch of every tree and name them. Where is your stone?”

I pulled it from my pocket. “Feel its warmth,” she said. “Feel the life inside of it and feel all the pain you carry and scream into the stone; do it now!!” she instructed. I did as she told me. With the stone clasped between my fingers, I yelled and screamed and withered away all the little burnt bits of my soul. She told me to scream louder and to stomp on the ground, so I did. She told me to press up against the wall and push with all my strength and to move the church, so I did. I shoved at the wall with everything I had. “Remember the fly,” she said. “Remember that the spider is coming. It is coming for you, now yell!” I screamed myself hoarse and amidst all the commotion, Mr. Gold had wandered in.

I was too tired to care. But I could see that Mr. Gold was studying the woman and what we were doing in the church.

“It is late,” Mr. Gold said.

“I know,” I said.

“This is your companion?” the woman asked, looking at me.

I nodded. She walked up to Mr. Gold and asked permission to hold his hands. He sneered at her, but held them up as requested. She clasped them in hers and began to murmur something to herself. Then she looked deep within him and Mr. Gold stared back at her.

She let go of his hands and walked back to her thermos without saying a word and poured a cup of tea. Then she walked across the room as if Mr. Gold didn’t exist. I wondered what had gone wrong. She gave me the cup and smiled and leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “There is blood on his hands, Chico. Darkness.”

With that, she packed up her things without saying a word and left, slipping out like a wraith. Leaving me and Mr. Gold all alone.

____________________________

Reagan Hale Pettigrew found his love for reading and writing while in the military. After his discharge, he began a new life on the road that took him from America to Europe. Suicide In Slow Motion is his breakout novel.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.