Squatters

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  By J T Pearson

  Copyright 2013 Joseph Pearson

  After Cameron was accused of insider trading, lost his job, had his assets frozen, was kicked out of his house by his wife of nearly forty years, and was openly shunned by everyone that had ever had the gall to have called themselves his friends, he found himself standing outside his boyhood home where he hadn't been in over a decade, not even after his mother had died and he and his brother Robert had inherited the estate. Cameron was never a good son.

  He stood in the street, his designer shoes covered in grey slush, the door to the cab still open while he gawked at how his mother's home which was once pristine, was now quite dilapidated. The cab fare from the bus terminal came to nineteen fifty. He handed the driver a twenty and told him to keep the change. The bus driver stomped on the accelerator, spraying Cameron, and leaving with him dripping and enraged, his bag still sitting in the back seat as the cab disappeared. He reached for his cell phone and his heart sank when he realized that it too was in his bag, a satchel that contained pretty much everything that he had still owned. He pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his overcoat and cleaned his face as he walked to the house, up the stairs and on to the porch. He paused as he stared at the knob. He searched his pockets until he came up with the key, turned the lock, opened the door, and stepped into the front hall where the boards still creaked when you walked on them, just as he had remembered. Even the last couch that his mother had owned still remained in the living room. It wasn't in the best shape but it looked functional. He was tired so he walked to the sofa and dropped down with a long sigh. He sat like that for nearly ten minutes until suddenly a young woman wearing nothing but black panties and a Rolling Stones t-shirt which had been cut off short enough to reveal her navel, casually strolled into the living room with a bowl of cereal. She sat down next to Cameron, pulled her legs up and crossed them beneath her, grabbed a remote that he hadn't noticed from his mother's end table, switched the television on to a soap opera, dropped the remote in her lap, and started eating. Cameron sat in shock, just staring at the side of her head as she chewed. After about a minute she noticed that he was staring at her.

  "You want a bowl of Trix?" She asked in between chewing.

  Cameron continued staring at her as if he were witnessing an apparition.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  "Amy." She tipped the bowl up and finished the milk before setting the bowl on his mother's end table. Then she reached under her hair and produced a joint from behind her ear. A lighter was produced from inside her bra which she used to light it. She took a long drag and then held it for a couple of beats before letting the smoke slowly escape through her nostrils. She held the joint out toward Cameron. He remained frozen.

  Another girl, who was clothed more adequately, walked in and sat down on the other side of Cameron. Amy held out the joint and she reached across Cameron and grabbed it. She drew some of it in and then studied Cameron.

  "Are you the guy?"

  Cameron didn't answer.

  "Is this the guy?" She asked Amy.

  Amy asked Cameron this time.

  "Are you the guy? The guy about the band?" She addressed him as if he might have some kind of mental deficiency which had kept him from answering her roommate.

  Finally Cameron answered them. "I'm not the guy about the band. I'm the guy that owns this house and I want to know what the hell you're doing here."

  The girl with pants on handed the joint back to Amy and then held her hand out to Cameron. "I'm China. We live here. Neil rents this place."

  Cameron ignored her outstretched hand. "Not from me he doesn't."

  "From a different old guy," offered Amy.

  "I want the two of you to gather up your things and get out of here before I call the police."

  "Relax," said China. "Neil will be back in a couple of hours. You can straighten things out with him." The two girls stood up and started walking away. China turned before leaving the room and said, "You look pretty beat. You should get some rest. The middle room on the second floor is open. You can take a nap up there. We'll let Neil know that you want to talk to him when he gets in." Then they left.

  Cameron cleared some of the mess in the smallest bedroom in the house and pulled a roll-a-way out of the closet. When he set it up the mattress had something sticky on it. He wiped his hands off on the filthy drapes in the room and then turned the mattress over. For Cameron a borderline germaphobe this was his vision of hell. He lied down on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. From his peripheral vision he could see the snow falling outside his window. His mind drifted. He wasn't entirely certain of his reason for coming back to the old place but he suspected that it was out of some form of instinct, something born of the primitive need for survival, similar to fish that swim upstream to reach the place of their birth when they spawn. He thought about his brother Robert and refused to believe that he would rent the house where they had grown up out to a bunch of motley strangers. Cameron suspected something nefarious, believing that they weren't actually paying anything, that they were one of the lowest forms of existence that he knew of, a constant and stubborn threat, worse than an infestation of rats to those who owned rental properties, like he had in the past before he had been forced to sell off much of his property to pay for mounting legal costs. He could feel it all the way down in his bones that these people were squatters.

  A terrible habit that Cameron had picked up as a child and had been unable to shake for more than twenty years tugged at him in this period wrought with stress. He wanted a cigarette so badly that he nearly got out of bed and sought a convenience store within walking distance but he soon overcame his weak moment reminding himself that he had very little money left. And besides that, only filthy people indulged themselves with such habits.

  Later that night, the lead singer of No Surrender, Neil Beformi (Kneel Before Me), came back to the house and was informed by his roommates that they had a well dressed elderly man sleeping upstairs who wanted all of them out of his mother's house by morning. While Neil received the news, Cameron was trying to sleep, exhausted from the stress that he'd been under, and physically spent from being crushed up against the wall of the bus he'd taken to Wisconsin by a four hundred pound man eating a continuous supply of jerky, Cheetos, and root beer, that he extracted from an overstuffed backpack resting between his knees.

  Cameron dreamt a strange dream in which he was living in a tree with a bunch of blue jays that kept swarming and pecking him. Cameron struggled to keep from falling out of the branches, using only the most inefficient weapon that he could've possibly found (his nearly empty wallet) to fend the angry fowl away. There was a bang on Cameron's door and it opened almost simultaneously, startling him out of the dream and into a sitting position, his cuff-length hair sticking out on one side of his head and matted on the other, creating the illusion that he was sailing past you, perhaps his head extended from the window of a moving car making the wind the true culprit of his appearance. His overcoat that he'd been using as a blanket abandoned him, slumping to the floor beside the rollaway, revealing an odd mauvish -colored pair of boxer shorts that his wife had picked out for him and that he had always found somewhat emasculating, and his thin sugar pale legs with uneven islands of gray hair that surrounded knobby knees. He still wore his long sleeved dress shirt that had a tag inside the collar that described the garment as wrinkle free. Cameron had managed to disprove that claim. His eyes were still slits fighting the invasion of light, struggling to become fully functional so he could defend himself if necessary.

  "You gotta problem with us?" asked Neil. The man standing in the threshold, his face an angry stupid contortion belonging to what was certainly a victim of both nature and nurture, a big ma
n, his long hair dripping with fresh snowflakes, a dull worn industrial trash chain that surely doubled as a weapon hanging from his waist, motorcycle boots - the steel tips scuffed and bent, an elaborate goatee dyed black as peat moss, a skull patch on one shoulder of his leather jacket, a hand with the middle finger extended on the other, his aggressive appearance seeming to properly sum up his attitude toward fellow man.

  In his disorientation, the first words from Cameron's mouth were "Get back, you nasty bird!"

  This clearly confused his new adversary. "Amy figured that you might have a screw loose." Neil said and shook his hair like a dog drying his coat, the melt spraying Cameron, dragging him breathlessly into reality.

  Amy, who the man had just referred to, was the first of the squatters he had met, the girl wearing nothing but a pair of black panties with the Rolling Stones lips and tongue logo screened across the back. First impressions like that have a way of imprinting one's identity permanently in another's brain. The other girl had one of those unnatural names, a hippy name, a state or a country. He couldn't make it clear in his mind's eye yet, his brain still clogged with sleep dirt.

  "I want you out of my house!" Cameron barked back at the man as soon as he was