Mr. Xavier's boy came around the woods a lot, the year after his father died, but nobody ever asked him to get out of the way or what in hail he was doing there AGAIN! I understood, that he was trying to hold onto the memory of his father. I as a cop knew a lot about the psychology of grief and most of us knew more about it in depth than we assumed.
That was Alex Xavier's senior year at Fresh Man High. He resigned from his football team and when he was offered to choose another sport, he chose NOTHING instead. It is hard to imagine a kid his age doing that, but that's what he did for he had decided that the time had come to put the games away and I always taunted him regarding his foolish choices.
Given how much the boy would stroll outside; I suppose it was inevitable that he'd see what was out there in the WILD! I was the one, he was most likely to take directions from because I had been his father's most closest friend but regards that I didn't hesitate a bit in giving him the wrong directions that led him into the woods...near the wild. "Kill or cure! Give that hound a curious dose of satisfaction.", his father used to say.
What happen to Mr. Xavier was simple. He was an ordinary North County drunkard; so much in love with tequila that it got him arrested twice and a year back in 1783, it took his life. He didn't mean to hurt anyone but that didn't kept us away from kicking him behind the grills for what an animal he had been all the forty three years of his life.
On a balmy Saturday night in June'1782, Mr. Xavier pulled over one of those big four wheelers he bought from a retired Navy Official. He parked the jeep near an intersection in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where that grumpy-old, crazy road master, Mr. Henry Noah showed up specifically in our part of the universe, all those years. You shall assume it a coincidence but as a cop I don't believe in coincidences, only chain of events which grows longer than usual and even more fragile until either bad luck or human mean-heartedness breaks them.
All these years, this harrowing remorse of killing Alex's childhood had been gnawing me inside , little by little, disrupting my outer facade like a sea plain stretching on the empty part of this world that doesn't exists, till an ordinary eye could see until the tide went out; Memories of a troubled past, surfaced on the ebbing waters. But what could I do now for this is only my memory preserved in a diary, my grandpa gifted me, dated: 19th November'1784. With that done, I wished Mr. Xavier's jeep would take me to heaven...After all my heart was left with nothing but GUILT!!!
