Cause and Effect

Chapter 1

solivagant [so·li·va·gant] 

(adj.)  someone who wanders or rambles the world alone; a solitary traveler

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John Marston was a wanderer. 

Never had the privilege of calling one lone place home, because that felt foreign and wrong, moving before all the local places started to feel familiar, picking up and moving on, that was him. Moving on before a place could give him a chance to feel right in all the wrong places.

Most time he ever spent in one place, was almost a year, holding down a shitty job as a cashier at a gas station before he was fired, and he had to run again because he had lifted almost fifty bucks off the tired half-coherent owner to fuel his own half-beaten up car to rattle on to the next exhausted town. 

He town-hopped, town to town to next dusty old broken town, sleeping in his car, because paying for a lease for an apartment would just be a waste of money because if there was one consistent thing he could count on in his shitty, inconsistent life, was the violence and crime that followed his name. Putting down roots, when they were sure to be pulled up violently was a waste of time and money, so he just kept himself comfortable, knew how to live out a trunk, and did laundry every few weeks when he could. 

Police reports named him as a criminal, petty larceny, auto theft, and disturbance of the peace highest on his rap sheet. He preferred to call himself fucking desperate, although the one time with the car was when he was barely a day over eighteen, and he had been high off his ass. And stupid too, because he'd only just barely gotten off with a few years, and a bigass fine, his lawyer arguing his sentence down for him from a damn felony to a misdemeanor. He'd even gotten off early on goddamn good behavior. 

John Marston, on good behavior, what a joke.

Barely twenty-five, and he's had prison time, already. Pretty sure it was written over the way he stood, hands shoved deep in pockets, back against the wall, waiting for somebody to come by and just look at him wrong so he could just have an excuse. His daddy had been goddamn right about him. 

He had just been fired from his last job, something about appearances in the workplace and John wanted to yell back that he was washing dishes for fuck's sake, in the back of a fuckin' burger joint. But he didn't, instead letting that warm anger wash over him, and pushed over the stack of dishes carefully stacked on the side of the stainless sink. The sound of the dishes shattering into little shards soothed him, and he knew it would take the place a long time, and a few pinched pennies to buy those dishes back. 

So yeah, now he's got willful destruction of property tacked onto his name, but he was out of town before he could be picked up, getting out before they got wise. He raced along empty wide roads now, windows down because he hadn't had air conditioning for a long painful time. He palmed the worn leather steering wheel in one hand, gazing out at the rolling plains, the other hand out the window tracing the wind.  

It was hot, not a humid hot, like in the deep south, where the air had as much water in the air as in the swamps and rivers that made up the midlands of the South. This was a dry heat, long stretches of winds over long stretches of open land that whipped heat in somber waves. 

Distantly he wondered if he would bump into one of the highway towns, one of those towns that always had one of those sketchy motels and maybe he could sleep in a bed for a night or two if his money stretched. He could go for a day or two at times, riding the highway, before he saw one of those highway towns, as he termed them, little shitshows of civilization served only to serve travelers, little fast-food chains, and sleazy motels outfitted with prostitutes and drug dealers.