Gray Skies

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Whiskey

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                Matthew stood before the mirror of the hotel and stared hard at himself. It had all come back to him now. He was a monster. A woman beater, a bully, someone who beat others down to make himself feel more powerful… he was his father.

                Though he was also something else now… he was a murderer. It mattered not to him that the man he had killed had been an Indian. A life was a life and Matthew had stolen a man’s life without any remorse at the time.

                God he felt remorse now.

                Worse than that he felt a hatred deep down in his soul. A hatred for himself. For the man he had let his father and the whiskey turn him into.

                He could remember Deniah trying to reach him when his whiskey obsession had first begun to rule his life.

                ‘Matthew, I love you and you are not yourself sine you’ve been drinking so heavily. I need you, Matthew, please do not go drinking tonight.’

                Matthew had scoffed at her, laughed at her, called her a fool and with the whiskey from the day before still burning in his blood he had gone off to find more. Deniah hadn’t understood! She hadn’t understood his pain, the guilt of knowing he’d caused his mother’s death and the physical pain of the beatings he had received his entire life, the beatings he had protected her from.

                But those days were over now. His father was dead. Deniah was dead. The man that Matthew had been before the accident was dead. Matthew had no doubt that she had died on that wagon in that landslide. Her body hadn’t been found beneath the mountain of mud and rocks but surely it had been there. Now Matthew just longed to be dead as well.

                He looked down at his hands. In one he clutched an unopened whiskey bottle and in the other a loaded revolver. Now there was only one decision to be made. To drink and forget a while before he ended his life or to simply get the trigger pull over with.

                He had nothing. His sister was dead and she had died hating him. He had murdered a man in cold blood and laughed about.

                Matthew’s stomach rolled and if he’d had anything left in it he would have been throwing it up into the wash basin. He thought of Jessica and shook his head, swallowing hard as he met his own hard brown eyes in the mirror. Matthew was a murderer and an abuser. Jessica damn well deserved better than that.

                A flash of the pain in Deniah’s eyes as Matthew grabbed her arm flashed through his mind again and Matthew cried out with rage and pain and threw the whiskey bottle with all his might. It crashed against the far wall sending glass and whiskey alike spraying across the room.

                Damn that whiskey!