I was still kind of nodding, having real trouble seeing where the guy was headed with all this. He was reading in my brain like those poetry magnets that kids put together on fridges. Words not adding up to anything. He seemed careless and floppy with the gun and I thought about my dad, a state trooper who had killed at least one man, who I saw kill my dog when he was mad at me when I was a child. Shot my dog in the head and made me bury it as punishment. I thought of that man whose toxic blood ran through my veins and I tried to remember if you rushed guns or knives, and I figured it had to be guns because you’d run away from a knife, for sure.
Rick was in front of the dying man’s bed, now pointing the gun back and forth at all three of us like carny ducks he was getting a bead on. “And you motherfuckers want me to put you back together after you rip me off?”
I still had no idea what he was getting at, but I figured, I’ll try to get this gun and if he kills me, that’s cool. Maybe this is where I die. Everything slowed down. My blood felt like roofing tar. All I saw was that gun and the hands that held it and everything else went away. I figured if I was going to let this fucker shoot me, well, so what? I just didn’t care.
That’s when I jumped into his chest, head down. I slammed him over the side bar of the dying man’s bed and started punching his sides. I know I hit Rick, but I also hit the bed rails, and I hit IV tubes, and I punched the dying man’s chest, and one landed hideously on his ventilator tube. Rick clawed at my back. I felt that he had both hands on my back, which meant he didn’t have the gun. I smelled piss from the catheter bag spilling to the hardwood floor, and a moment later Rick and I were sloshing in it, the dying man’s bed rolling off sideways like a drifting luxury liner, me still punching at Rick’s guts, because that’s where you hurt a man. Idiots punch heads. I’m not tough, but I know that much. I kneed him in the balls repeatedly until he was making sounds like a little kid and spit bubbled slowly from his mouth. I did it hard enough for my knee and thigh to start hurting.
By the time Doc pulled me off of him, I think I was ready to kill the guy. I never saw that coming. I was willing to let him kill me, but I hadn’t anticipated the savage rush I was still feeling. I was briefly sickened by the notion that my father, in all his animal brutality, would have been, for once, proud of me. I felt like puking in a corner.
Doc held the gun and Sandra busily tried to reattach the tubes and wires I had ripped out of her patient, whose machines, I now noticed, were all going faster and louder than before. I didn’t know if the guy was worse off, or if I was just in some adrenaline-fueled space where noises were louder. Rick was at my feet clutching his balls in a puddle of the dying man’s piss. I was drenched from the piss, from the tub, and from sweat, which flowed out of me like my pores had tripled in size.
Doc said, “Sandra, we’re going to take what we came for.”
She nodded. “What about Rick?”
“We could call the cops after we leave,” I suggested.
Sandra shook her head. “If he talks, cops are going to start asking me questions.” She paused. “And then they’ll talk to you.”
We should kill him, I thought. This is not a thread to leave loose. My father would have killed him.
I said, “Maybe you don’t know us as well as you really do. When Rick wakes up, you tell him we’re strangers.”
Doc turned to me. “He’ll come looking for us.”
I said what I was thinking: “It’s that or we kill him. And the biggest idiot cop on the planet would connect the dots to us in one interview with her.” This was when it occurred to me that if we killed Rick, we’d have to kill Sandra. But that would still leave way too much connective tissue from us to this scene. And I couldn’t believe I was even thinking about it. I at least had enough sense to pull back. Rick rolled around semiconscious on the floor. Doc kicked him in the thigh. Then again.
“Fucker.” Doc shook his head. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
I got my bag. Doc put the gun in his pants and started to collect more of the patches and pills from Sandra, who I’m guessing already had the money, or else she was too scared to ask about it.
Regardless, I went out the side door I’d noticed earlier. Doc followed me. I walked by the recycling and garbage cans and out the side yard gate. The driveway had a newer Lincoln next to Doc’s car. Rick’s car, I logged, in case I ever saw it again. I stopped, glanced left, away from the dead end and toward 17th Street, my hair still wet and the sun warming me as I peered down the street and then walked toward Doc’s car, trying hard to look like what I was. A man stepping into the passenger side of a car on a beautiful day.
We got in. Doc took a deep breath and then another and had both hands on the wheel without starting the car. He lit a cigarette and said, “Dude, you were a fucking hero in there.”
I didn’t look in his eyes. Lawn sprinklers whirled on at the neighbor’s house. He fired the ignition and we pulled out of the driveway, away from the Lincoln I hoped to never seen again in my life.
Doc said it again. “Dude, you are fucking heroic.”
And this time, just to shut him up, just so I’d never have to hear it again, I said, “Yeah.”
A Good Day’s Work
by Nathan Walpow
Seal Beach
Rae was Hank’s daughter. She had it and she flaunted it, and though some of it was starting to sag, when you’re on the downside of your sixties and living in Leisure World, you can let stuff like that pass.
So when Hank suggested walking to the pier, and that Rae — who’d been staying with him for a month or so — would pick us up and have lunch with us and drive us back, I couldn’t say no. Sheila was still my world, but a guy can have fantasies. So I told Hank yes and we met at the giant metal globe out by the guard gate and crossed to the other side of Seal Beach Boulevard, by the Naval Weapons Station. We figured they were up to something diabolical over there, like in that movie The Mist that Hank got on Netflix, where the military types open a rift to another dimension and giant insects show up and eat everyone. We thought it would be fun watching three-foot dragonflies chasing down the ladies from the quilting club.
Someone coming the other way might’ve thought we were brothers. It was more than just the old-white-haired-man thing. Our faces were the same shape and our eyes the same watery blue and our mustaches were like caterpillars from the same batch. Every once in a while we’d catch someone looking. I’d never had a brother, and it was kind of fun having at least a pretend one.
Maybe a quarter mile along some moron had taped a campaign sign to the fence that kept the riffraff out of the naval base and the overgrown cockroaches in. The senatorial election propaganda had started showing up lately, on bumpers and stuck in lawns and stapled to light poles. I planned on voting for Roger Elliot. He wasn’t much of anything, but his heart seemed in the right place.
The other guy, Tim Swift, was a right-wing maniac better suited for a turn-of-the-century hanging judgeship than the U.S. Senate. Which was how he’d gotten elected to Congress for eleven terms in Orange County. But I guessed it wasn’t enough for him, because since he’d gotten himself nominated for senator, he’d ramped up the Neanderthal stuff. Truth be told, the guy scared me, especially after that reporter got roughed up. Swift was playing for keeps.