WRITING: NANOWRIMO 2022
Handling the Horseshit
American Kingdom: Day 2
Previous chapter:
I was a different woman when I returned to Marion Square. I was on my bike — not a tourist bike but my good bike — bugout bag on my back, painkillers working their way through my system where they battled with a righteous fury spreading out from my broken heart.
I won’t say that they were lined up in formation but twenty-three tourists and twenty-three bikes were present and correct under a stand of trees on Tobacco Street beside the old Citadel.
Some of them had been indulging: in lunch, a beer, a bookstore (the area here catered to all student vices). As I approached, Brian — once a colonel, always a colonel, apparently — saluted me with a bottle of coke.
“Ready to go, Ma’am!”
His face fell when he saw mine.
“Stand easy, guys,” he said, and drew me aside.
I was still liberally spread with horse poop on my jeans, the graze on my arm had formed a crusted scab, blood oozing from the elbow, and my face was like thunder.
“Sorry, Colonel,” I said, “things at home didn’t quite go the way I planned. We’ll finish the tour, though.”
He beckoned to a woman standing nearby, watching us with keen interest. They all were, to tell the truth.
She was slender, silver-haired, khaki pants and a trim long-sleeved top. I didn’t need telling to recognise a colonel’s wife when I saw one.
“Marion, my co-pilot,” he said.
I stuck out my hand. It wasn’t the cleanest, to be honest. I’d been wiping away tears all the way back but I’d pulled myself together the last block or so.
She took it without hesitation.
“You look like shit,” she said, comfortingly. “and smell like it too.”
“No fit state to carry on, is what I’m thinking,” Brian said. She nodded.
I nodded inside, but I had my duty. I shook my head.
“You paid for a full-day tour, and that’s what you’ll get. I aim to have everyone smiling and satisfied at the end of the day. We’ll keep going. This is the downhill stretch, Sir.”
Not literally downhill, Charleston doesn’t do hills, but with everyone relaxed and bonding together, eager to hear more stories — and I had some doozies coming up — this was the fun part. The challenge was to keep everyone serious enough to keep their eyes on the road and not slide under a bus. Or a horse-drawn carriage.
I gritted my teeth.
Brian glanced at his wife. She was looking at me, looking into my soul in that way that only a colonel’s wife can do.
“Your partner will be back soon. I'm thinking you need to go home and have a good long soak.”
“Ex-partner,” I said, hauling out my phone and showing her the picture I’d taken before slinking downstairs.
“Oh, my!”
Brian reached for the phone but she shook her head at him.
“You and I are going back to our Airbnb and get you tidied up. Brian will keep the show on the road until this guy catches up. Do you have a map, some notes?”
Tempting, but no.
I shook my head. “Our insurance lapses if a tour guide isn’t present. I have to supervise this mob of drunken yahoos just in case, oh I don’t know, someone hits a pothole and falls under a carriage.”
“Well,” she said, looking at me fiercely. “At least give me five minutes in a powder room to get you presentable.”
Brian took my bike while I allowed myself to be marched away. The hotel that now occupied one end of the old Citadel military academy had a sweet little ladies' room that we left looking — and smelling — a lot less minty-fresh after ten minutes work. Marion slipped the porter a bill as we left, suggesting a previous occupant may have been unwell.
I tried to give her some money — it had been my mess after all — but she ignored the bigger bills I pulled from my purse and took a single.
“If you insist,” she said, “but really I’m just paying something forward from a long time ago.”
Brian was having the time of his life. He’d found my set of notes and was interpreting them freely. Marion Square, he was informing both the tour group and sundry passers-by, had been named in honour of his wife, a statue of whom had been mounted atop a tall column in the centre of the square until it had been removed in the name of decency.
Marion cleared her throat loudly.
“Or so the legend goes,” he finished up, doffing his hat to his wife and a somewhat damp but squeaky-clean tour leader.
(For the record, the square was named after Francis Marion, the famed Swamp Fox, an early special forces leader in the Revolutionary War, held in high regard by we Rangers, nearly two and a half centuries later.)
The whole thing, chapter by chapter, in progress:
Daily notes:
