Chapter Six – Mr. Marks

I stared at the man clutching my arm. How the hell was I supposed to help him? Tears continued streaming down his face, and I wondered what my chances of escaping the bar were. Surely I could move faster than him – I wondered that he was still upright, drunk as he was – but he still had my arm held in a vice grip.

Thankfully, Ryan walked into Sloppy Seconds just then, probably wondering why I hadn’t come out yet. Usually I was in and out as fast as possible, trying to not linger in the filth for long. A smirk crossed my friend’s face as he saw my predicament.

“Hello, Mr. Marks,” he called as he crossed the bar to us, “why don’t we go home now?”

The man’s grip loosened slightly when Ryan reached us. I looked at Ryan incredulously.

“My mama works with him at the counseling center,” he explained with a shrug. Ryan’s mama worked with addicts, trying to help them wrestle the demons down and clean their lives up. Clearly it wasn’t working so well with this man.

“Help me,” he repeated his plea, to Ryan this time.

“Of course,” Ryan pried Mr. Marks’s hand from my arm. “Let’s get you out of here and you can let us know how to help you.” It was amazing how different he was when he put on clinic-voice, the demeanor his mama practically beat into him when he helped out down at the center.

Half an hour later, we sat at Bubba’s, Ryan and I on one side of a booth and Mr. Marks on the other, clutching a mug of coffee. He had stopped crying, but his red-rimmed eyes gave away his distress. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. He stared into his drink as he told us his story:

Sam Marks used to be a respected man. He worked for the state government, climbing in rank and earning a Country Club salary. That was before he found the bottle. Once he started drinking, he lost his job. He lost the beautiful house he and his family had lived in, and definitely lost the respect of his peers. He took to gambling, trying in vain to win back the money he was dumping into booze. His world was falling apart around him, and he didn’t know how to get it back.

“The worst of it is,” he said, “poor, gentle Sadie has to work now to keep us in the house.”

My head snapped up in recognition. Sadie Marks. Before now I didn’t make the connection that this could be her father. Sadie was a shy, unassuming girl. She wore plain skirts and cardigans to school every day and never went anywhere without her Bible. Which really wasn’t that different from the other girls in our class, except that, unlike them, Sadie never used the book as a weapon. She kept it because she truly believed it.

“Mr. Marks,” Ryan was using his most soothing voice, the voice he might would use if he were trying to approach a wild dog, “teenagers have to work all the time. It’s okay that Sadie has to work. Just keep trying, Mr. Marks. You can make things right.”

Without warning, he started sobbing loudly again. The other diners were turning to watch us. Ten years of being invisible, and in one day this man was going to attract the attention of the whole town to me. Great. I shielded my face with my hands.

“I can’t go back,” he muttered, “I can’t go back.” It was becoming a mantra; he repeated this over and over again.

I nearly jumped out of my seat as Mr. Marks grabbed my hand. He pleaded with me with his eyes. “You made it without a daddy,” he said, “you gotta help my kids. Help Sadie know she is better without her daddy around.” He sobbed again, and it echoed in the diner, “Tell her I am sorry. So, so sorry.”

And with that, he was leaving. His gait was surprisingly steady as he crossed the diner; he walked through the doorway without even a glance back at our table.

Ryan and I watched him go, unsure whether we should follow him or not. With a shrug, Ryan turned back to his plate of fries – his stomach was like a bottomless pit.

“We tried, man.” He said. “He’ll sober up and go back home.”

We finished our meal in silence, which was rare for Ryan. I knew where his mind was, and I didn’t want to interrupt his thoughts. Ryan lost his own daddy to alcohol when he was a kid; the experience with Mr. Marks couldn’t have been easy for him. I let him think about his daddy as I did my best to forget about my own.

Finally we left the diner. Ryan’s car was still parked outside Lou’s – he didn’t trust Mr. Marks drunk in the back seat, so we had stumbled to the diner – so we had to walk the four blocks to pick it up. We rounded the corner and were assaulted by blinking lights.

Police cars, a fire engine, an ambulance. This was a lot of action for little Vicksburg. A throng of people crowded the scene, and Ryan and I pressed forward to see what was going on. I broke through to the front of the crowd – one benefit of being such a beanpole is that I can squeeze through tight spaces. The driver of the car looked shell-shocked as he and a police officer talked at the back of a squad car. He motioned toward his vehicle, and that’s when I saw him.

Sam Marks lay on the ground, his body bent in an impossible angle. Blood pooled slowly around him as the paramedic prepared a black bag.