Short Folk #26: Buddy

Note: This is the beginning to what I hope will be a much longer piece. I've gotten some good feedback on how to focus on voice. So this piece is all about voice, and its a continuation of some characters I have used in the past. And its supposedly what will follow that weird intro I posted about a week ago.

Short Folk: 26 Buddy

So My buddy calls me up and says he’s got his momma in a jar and he ain’t stoppin til she sees the California ocean. Funny, but I knew just what he was thinkin. So I said goodbye to my own mother and took a greyhound east to Jacksonville which is the last place I knew he was at. I make it ok and I get up to the trailer I knew he rented with his momma and there was nothing but a note saying he couldn’t wait any longer and that he had started out hitchin and telling me to find him out on highway 30. There was this big ol rusty Skylark with not more than a drop of gas in it, so that’s what I took, spending the last of my traveling money on a full tank to find him. Finding him was the easy part. Can’t miss buddy. He’s sitting on the side of the highway near the state line with the urn at his side that was all bronze like a bullet with a lid on it. And he’s just looking down the road in my direction, like he knew it was me that was coming over the horizon.

First off he says it took me long enough, then before he’ll get in the car with me, he says I have to “submit to the ritual” was how he said it. And he takes the top off that bronze bullet of an urn and tells me to wet my fingers. Hell no I say but then he gives me those eyes of his that are saying, if you don’t do this, I’ll just keep right on going in the skylark. And theres no true way of telling about buddy except to say that its damn impossible to say no to him when he gives you those eyes. At least at this point, I would have followed him to the ends of the earth when he gave me those blue eyes. So I wet a finger like testing the wind and dipped into the urn and felt the ash in there like real fine sand and when I brought it out the wet part was covered in a grey dusting of the stuff and then I put my finger in my mouth. Good says buddy, now there are four of us traveling in this car. You and my momma and me and my momma. And you remember to keep your manners around my momma.