Free The Poison Sky by John Shannon

was too full of predators to let that go on.
    But everybody these days had an extra helping or two of distress, he thought. He was broke, and he missed his daughter, and once in a while he even got nostalgic for his nice secure aerospace job and his suburban house and the big garage-workshop with his radial arm saw and drill press, now parked at a friend’s, and even the little slobbering friendly cocker spaniel instead of the permanently pissed-off half coyote he’d acquired. But he knew he could shove the regrets down inside himself and hold them there out of the way, along with all the other stuff that he’d dropped overboard or screwed up or never quite got right. Stuff came and went and you just had to let it go.
    He sipped at the coffee and made a face. There was one thing he’d never quite locked down, if he let himself think about it. It was Hedrick talking about his time in Vietnam that reminded him. For a few years in the early seventies, just back from the war and wandering around in a bit of a druggy haze, he’d fallen in with some angry vets and they’d dragged him along to meetings of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They’d really pumped themselves up with the possibilities of changing things, the war, then racism, sexism, capitalism, lots of things. He’d got a real charge out of it for a couple of years, until one day during a march on the Federal Building on Wilshire everything had suddenly turned pointless on him, just like that, and he’d been clobbered by the realization that he wasn’t really part of some vast social movement that was going to carry them all toward a worthy goal.
    What he’d seen in one disturbing moment was the fact that life pretty much chugged along on its own, and things strayed here and there without much purpose at all. You did your best with what you had, but there was no guarantee it would ever mean much. He’d rocked back on his feet at the time, hit by a genuine wave of nausea. It wasn’t really belief in anything specific that had fled as much as the capacity for belief. And before very long he found there wasn’t even a seam where it had been. Whatever it was had been torn out of the continuum of his life and the gap had clanged shut, and all he’d been left was a vague sense of deprivation, a feeling on late nights that something ought to be different. Too, he wished he had back his Good Conduct Medal that he’d tossed over the fence at the VA.
    There was a plus side to it all, though. In the years since that queasy revelation he’d grown used to the kind of randomness of things that plagued Faye. That kept him from thinking he had it all figured out. He didn’t much like people who thought they had it all figured out, which was probably what irked him about the big bald guru.
    “Refill?” The waitress had a vertical scar on her cheek, as if a rotten boyfriend had cut her for some reason. She carried a round glass pot in each hand, one with a brown neck and one orange.
    “Thanks, regular. You a vegetarian?” he asked.
    “Huh-uh. Do I look like it or something?”
    “Everybody seems to be something these days.”
    “I’ve started doing a little past-life research,” she admitted. “My roomie said she found out she used to be a Nabatean princess.”
    “Far out,” he said. They never found out they’d been serfs or cabdrivers, or night soil workers, he thought.
    “Maybe I’ll be something nice.”
    “Good luck,” he offered as she wandered away. If everybody got their deepest wishes about life, he thought, things would probably be even worse than they were.
    People were arriving in clumps and the place began filling up. Just after noon, Faye Mardesich wandered in carrying a string bag full of pamphlets and books. She looked the place over for a minute before finding him and he had the distinct impression she would have burst into tears if she’d had to look around one more instant.
    “Oh, Jack,” she started, and ran down. She sat