Just Another Dead Man Walking.

Frankie was just 24 coming back from the war. He faked his age in joining the infantry at 17. Like many, he had had enough of these stories of Hitler. And now he was back to his family in a small town in the South. Everyone embraced him, considered him a hero. He did have medals he never showed, but somehow everyone knew about them. He was thought of as a handsome young man, despite the slight limp from the shrapnel in his leg. And despite the long bayonet scar across his forearm. no one asked him about it. They couldn't have handled it if they had. He had killed some people.

He liked to walk the railroad tracks into an area known as Round Town at night. It was a short-cut to the local bars. There was one he went to and put money down on games of Pool, not caring whether he won or lost. One night though, he went off in a drunken rage when someone over-stepped some line in his mind. He nearly killed the man, picking up the bar stool he had been sitting on, and breaking it into pieces over the man's body. Instincts had taken over. He could have killed the man easily. He could have pinched that soft spot in the man's larynx with no more than a finger and a thumb. He knew how to do that. The man would have turned purple upon dying. With one swift chop of his hand to the man's nose he could have driven that bone straight up into the brain. He knew how to do that too. He hardly had to think about it. Done deal. That was what war taught him. He came to his senses in time to spare the man, but spent three nights in jail.

On this one moonless night he whistled his way down the tracks to Lucy's Bar and Grill. It was a starry night, and in his mind, he re-named the constellations after his dead friends. There is Johnny taking a knife in the back. And that one there, was Billy with his head blown off. He ran into some woman named Annie at the bar. She was a red-head with freckles and already drunk when he bought her a beer. He could tell she was married, yet there alone. She kept rubbing her fingers along the scar on his arm. They fucked on the back of someone's truck in the alley behind the bar. He staggered home along the tracks, half-whistling, half-humming, half singing, in a slurred drunken voice. He never made it home.

The local newspaper the next morning had a story of a drunk run over by a train. In the coroner's report however, it was noted he also had a bullet in the back of his skull.