(Please Leave All Firearms at This Point)---from Henry Redding

Henry Redding, a rambling truck-driver, is lured into a solution for his smoking habit, and uncovers much more about the meetings he attends and the man that leads them.

 Henry Redding, 1997

 

 

 

 

If I crack a grin it’s from nerves, but I don’t feel anything on my face.

I’m going to hold onto it.

Then I see the man looking at the bulge at my waistline.

S**t.

Get out now.

My legs are moving toward the group.

They stop at another man’s voice.

"Henry Redding!" it calls me over. "Come join the circle. You’re late enough as it is."

If I’d thought it over, waited, I would of recognized it, but I wasn’t doing either. The man sat again before I could see him, blending into the group.

I walk the rest of the way to the circle. I remember orange light falling in through the windows at the very top of the wall.

They look at me, faces that’re old, young, middle-aged. There are probably twenty faces there, two or three women in the mix. I’m glad when the voice comes again so I’ve got something to look at, not all of those faces. It’s him, of course. I’m not surprised.

John Smith’s built like me, but skinnier and just as much lean. His face’s narrow, chin pointed with a light cleft, blue eyes. He’s dirty blonde as I’ve said, but one week he’s black, one brown, back to blonde, one week with a goatee, one week without. I’ll see this later. One of his legs is propped across the other one. He’s got a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his shirt sleeve, bulging against his shoulder.

"Well, you’ve come on a good night." He holds his hands up, showing me around. "A good turnout for this part in the week. Pull up a chair and join us."

I stand there looking at his face.

I don’t know what I’m feeling.

Wonder.

Nervousness.

I’m not like this. I could pull the revolver out of my jeans and nail him dead on for it.

John Smith motions for the entrance tough-guy to get me a chair, and he does, and I sit. My face is hot. He looks at me, kind of smiling, and moves on.

Across the circle, straight shot.

"Okay," his voice booms, and he claps his hands together. "So we all want to quit smoking, huh? I mean, it causes cancer—throat cancer, lung cancer, mouth cancer. Basically you become one big walking cancer stick yourself after a while. And, not to mention, it ruins relationships, if that matters to whoever it is your relationship is corresponding to. Mostly we want to quit to better our lives." He looks around at every face while he talks. "Bettering our lives . . . hmm, an interesting subject."

The man’s out of his seat and walking.

Congratulations, Mr. John Smith. In two minute’s time you’ve managed to turn into the college professor I never had.

"An interesting subject because . . . what happens after you succeed in quitting? You’re free from nicotine, that’s true. Everything you hoped it was? Oh, it certainly is—you’re moving about more, getting your exercise easier, you feel healthier than before. The spouse’s feeling good, you’re feeling good, we’re just all around happy . . . What happens then, a little down the road? From a realistic standpoint, I’ll tell you the truth: those bills are still coming in faster than you can fumble, and you’re saving more money now, but when they come you don’t see how.

Then the spouse, they’re still unhappy outside of your quitting success—unhappy about how you eat now, or maybe they think you’ve taken up drinking instead, you weigh even more than before, you’re still in heart attack country. Or maybe you have kids, maybe you live alone. It doesn’t matter . . . What I’m asking you is this: is there ever happiness? Smoking is gone, done with . . . but isn’t that largest portion still there?"

He looks at me, then away.

"That unhappiness? You’ve only dropped a few potatoes out of the sack."

He sits and unrolls the pack from his sleeve.

"Now, to get to the real deal." He takes a cigarette from the pack, puts it at the corner of his mouth, and lights it.

He looks around the room, nodding. "We have some unfamiliar faces joining us tonight. I’m not going to make you stand up and introduce yourself or anything like that. We’re all here for the same reason.

"Now, I should explain something before I go on." He thinks of how to say it. "Not anybody gets to come down here and attend our meetings."

He stays on one person on my side of the circle, and I look to see who it is. My mouth feels like it’s went dry, and I try to swallow. It’s the woman—Janis. I look away before somebody sees me staring at her, but when I look around at the people, trying to be casual, I see six or seven of the faces around me are doing the same thing.

"Only the people I think can handle getting their acts together."

John Smith’s standing again. Looking down at us.

"Do you know what picking up a prostitute says about you . . . what it means?"

The woman—Janis—keeps her eyes on John, solemn.

A test. Dear God.

An initiation.

One man across the circle is rubbing his sweaty forehead, like what he’s just realized is an almost physical pain.

"It says your brave, most of all . . . not afraid of taking risks or the consequences that come after . . . Someone potentially risking the marriage they’ve had for so long, putting your physical health on the line, the relationship you share with your children, maybe. What if your family found out? Your boss? Your neighborhood? All of those things, on the line in

that instant."

I’m expecting fatty to walk out any second.

"After this it could say more than one thing: loneliness, unsatisfaction with a relationship at home, boredom, or maybe you were looking for revenge. But most of all, that you can put everything on the line."

He waits.

Then:

"Let’s take a little break. Coffee, tea, I think maybe a few beers leftover, they’re on the table over there with the baked stuff."

People get up and shuffle around my chair. I sit there. I’m not the only one.

What’s going on here?

What is this?

I sit there and watch the people at the coffee urns and the Casey boxes, and I hope John Smith or anybody else doesn’t see how things’re moving too fast behind my eyes, but then I see he’s at the table too, talking with some men.

She’s still sitting in her chair down the row. There’s still a few men in the circle, and she’s making this awkward. Fatty’s still across from me, but he’ll get up a little later. The woman’s dressed in slacks and a green top with her hair down and neat. I wonder how she can be "Janis." Her face is almost bare of makeup. Her eyes are thoughtful. I look away and

don’t come back to her.

I count seven empty chairs when the meeting starts up again. John Smith looks around and says to the people looking at him (I’m one of them) over the jumble of voice: "I do this every meeting when we have more than a few new faces. Give them time to thin out."

Then he claps his hands together like before, and they start to get quiet.

I’m thinking about how I regret not grabbing one of those beers before they went.

With fewer people I’m able to look at them better. All I remember noticing that night was another woman (mid-thirties, dressed professionally, looks like the soccer-mom type), the slim two or three guys John was talking to around the back table, the kid one or two chairs over—he doesn’t look like he could smoke legally yet, even. Then I don’t look around anymore because John begins.

"So how many of you are happy with your life?"

I don’t move.

Nobody does.

I wonder if they’re wondering (like the professional mom over there) if he’s serious, should they raise their hands or not? Then I know the other kind—if they raise their hands, say they are, they know we can see through them. They’re lying.

"Are you really happy with what you’ve made for yourself, or are you one of those people who’re trying to quit smoking because that’s just one more thing you’re working on in improving your life because it’s such a s**t hole wreck? Are you trying to solve this problem, when it’s really not the problem at all?"

 

I stop by a gas station and buy three beers to take to my hotel room. I sit on the bed and drink them one right after the other, thinking about what he said. I try not to.

When they’re gone I pull off my shoes and try to fall asleep.

 

 

I’m up a little while before the phone rings.

Since I’ve got up I’ve been hanging around the place, wondering what I should do with myself. I’ve got this room until tomorrow, unless I want to extend my stay.

I keep asking myself, why would I want to?

I’ve checked out the meeting and this man John Smith.

I can hear the couple next to me arguing because their door’s open. Something about (the woman saying this) not asking permission before he buys anything.

I think about what John said: are you happy with your life?

What am I waiting for?

I decide to get some breakfast over to Denny’s. All they’ve got here are some biscuits

(stones in gravy), some fruit, bagels, nothing a man can use.

I sit through dinner eyeing some of the younger waitresses and thinking. Seems like the only thing I’m good for these days. Trying to set my mind straight, remember?

Are you happy with your life?

Are you happy with what you’ve made for yourself?

No.

Is quitting smoking just the first step in wanting to improve your life?

Even though you think it’s the only step there is, nothing else is wrong.

Yes.

I walk back to the hotel, and I know why I’m stalling: I believe everything John Smith said, down to every letter of what I can make sense of. It’s the truth.

I want another meeting.

When I’m back in my room I flip through the t.v., and I’m not really watching it because my mind still can’t focus after I’ve sorted some of this s**t out.

John Smith’s question of the week: what’s really making you unhappy?

These’re the times faces come back, and they’re all the same—ugly: "friends"—I use to hear my step father ranting like drunks do about how you can’t trust anybody, and, if he very well knew it or not, there’s truth to that. We’re trying to get what we want for ourselves, and we look out for our own heads before anybody’s elses. And I see faces as far back as highschool, and the way teachers looked at me and some of the other kids, like they knew what you’d amount to the moment you walked in your first year: the s**t on the hole of society. Adults, some of them do the same thing, too. You watch. Watch for that look in their eyes. Sometimes I think they were always right about me. Sometimes I don’t; I’m not as bad off as some people. Either way I think people like me (some of them) survive because they know the truth of things, or at least they think they do, and there’s some people who’re oblivious to the whole damned picture.

Then there’s some people who still look at me that way.

I think about the times when I’m alone. I wonder if I’d be happier married. I always swore I never would.

Melissa’s face.

Some chicks from highschool.

The phone saves me. I pick it up on the first ring and discover John Smith’s voice on the other end. You can guess my heart’s doing the same thing it always does when the guy catches me off guard.

"Hey, Henry, how’re you doing this morning?"

I tell him just fine. A lie. If he could see me he’d know it, too.

"That’s great. I just wanted to give you my number in case you needed it." Then adds:

"I mean, if you plan on coming to any more meetings."

 

Sure, I say. My hands are shaking a little when I get a pen and pad. Go ahead.

The number has a Kansas City area code.

"Now, this is the number for an apartment I’ve got uptown. Most of the time I won’t be there." He gives me his cell phone number and then says, "I’m out of town a lot, or I’m staying with friends."

John doesn’t ask me a single thing about my smoking, like hey, how you holding up? He’s getting ready to leave. So I clear my throat and say something like:

John?

"Yeah?"

Why’d he let me keep my gun last night?

He doesn’t hesitate. "It was the only way you’d stay, wasn’t it?"

He got me dead on on that.

I ask him how he knows me.

"I worked for the same company as you a long time ago in Kansas. I saw you once or twice, and I always remembered how you looked like you’d rather be anywhere but there and the way you looked at some of the people."

Another hit.

"So, what . . . you lure men in with prostitutes?" I ask him.

"Look, Henry," he says to me, "I can’t talk a lot longer, but here’s how I run things: yes, I get some men in doing this, although I don’t know if lure’s the right word for it. It took a little more for you. I had to pull some strings, but like that man you were looking at last night, the one who left, they usually think they can follow one of the girls in the group, and they end up at one of our meetings—those’re the ones that leave the first night usually. Other people I have to pull strings."

I don’t have much of anything I can say.

"All right, Henry, I better let you go. I just wanted to give you my number. I guess I’ll see you Thursday if you decide to come, okay?"

All right.

I hang up.

I don’t know what to do but sit there and look at the t.v., but my head’s a little clearer.

I think I’ll extend my stay.

See what happens.

 

The next morning I feel better, like I’m recovering from a hangover. I go out and get breakfast, look around a couple different shops until two or three, and I’m still not hungry for lunch. Anyway, I end up buying a few movies on sale (one with Clint Eastwood and one with Jack Nicholson—you can’t go much wrong with those two) and a pair of pants.

Lo and behold, when I get back and the phone rings, it’s John Smith. He’s telling me the meeting tomorrow night will be at the new address he gives me. He knows I’m coming and that I won’t be able to make it to all of the time with my job. It’s just for future reference.

 

Thursday night comes. I sleep a few hours before I go, and I remember waking up excited, if

you can believe that. I don’t know why I was excited then, but I was, and a little nervous.

Late again. It takes me half an hour just to find the address he gave me, and I’ve got to confess, it’s for an elementary school in town. How’d John get this place for our meeting? All I can think of is probably one of the men he’s friends with (or that at least go to the meetings) is some part of the school staff. This turns out to be exactly right—bull’s eye.

His name is Jim Lyons, and he tells us he’s been working a full-time shift as a janitor here for two years. He’s average height, slim, dark hair, receding hairline.

Tonight John’s dressed in carpenter jeans and a plain green t-shirt. He looks tired, but it isn’t showing. He says Jim is our volunteer guest for tonight.

This guy’s not shy. He looks around at all of us in the gym, straight in the eye. There’s about the same number of people as last time, give or take, with faces before gone and new faces added, so I guess it balances out. Janis is here and so is the other woman (I’m surprised by the latter), and a new woman’s joined us. Her black hair is done up in a bun, and she’s wearing a jean dress, something you’d find a house maid wearing. The woman must be older than Jim Lyons, forty-five at most. She looks like she’s got problems farther than smoking by the way her eyes dart around the circle nervously, then back to her feet. Everybody else appears a little more relaxed tonight. The ones I recognize are the "regulars" that were talking to John Tuesday night, and I’m not surprised at all that the men who looked even a bit scared or nervous aren’t here.

Hell, I am surprised I’m here.

"I got fired from my last job for something I didn’t do. I got fired and then I lost my kids because my ex-wife thinks I should be on the registered sex offender list. And all of this started because of a little envelope in one of our closets . . . I got into it looking for something, can’t remember, and I found this envelope on one of the shelves that was part of my space, and I opened it." He doesn’t hesitate to tell us the rest. "There were some pictures cut out of a porno, looked like, and then there were some somebody had taken of little kids. I put them back where they were. I didn’t say anything to anybody, you know, a man’s business is a man’s business, but I kept wondering about the group of men I worked with, and whose they were. I liked them, they acted like everybody else . . . Most of them had wives and families. And then the next day I’m called in to talk to my boss, Randall Norcross, because I guess I didn’t cover it back up as good as I thought, and I was the one being accused. The whole school knew, and I didn’t even hear a thing about it until this day, sitting across from him. I couldn’t barely breathe. Then he said, really low, that he didn’t think the envelope was mine, but . . . like I said, the whole school knew, and I didn’t know it, but the reason why so many kids had been gone that week was because their parents were keeping them home, not because of a bug going around. He told me he couldn’t have the school board and the teachers and the parents, or even the kids, think he was endangering them by keeping me there, so he had to let me go. Then a week later my ex took my kids away, or, you know, she wouldn’t let me see them—she never let me have custody of them in the first place—and I was looking for another job for about a year." He pauses. "People looked at me different after that. Somehow the whole street I lived on knew, and they’d send me threats or wouldn’t talk to me. Hell, one couple spray-painted my car . . . but they didn’t have proof on me, so I couldn’t be charged with anything or put on that list. I think if I was I probably wouldn’t of found a job for an even longer time."

I look around and see that kid from Tuesday night, and there’s a look on his face that says he’s heard about Jim before.

Jim still doesn’t see his kids.

Jim doesn’t live in the same house anymore.

This is the story of what’s made Jim unhappy.

When he’s done we don’t clap, don’t say anything. We just look at him. Only the kid looks like he’s got some kind of input but he doesn’t add it.

John thanks him. I can tell he’s heard his story before by how he was looking around at all of us to see our reactions instead of at Jim to show his concern. I see the look on his face and realize these meeting have got nothing to do with smoking. I wonder if Jim Lyons smokes, even.

Then John asks if anybody else’s got something to say. "Tonight’s the night we get some things off our chests . . . What’s really bothering you?"

The kid raises his hand.

"Yeah?"

The kid’s looking over at Jim Lyons. "Did you use to work at Charles Central?"

Jim’s not taken by surprise by the question. He looks like he’s been asked it more than a time or two before. "Yeah, that’s it."

"Oh." The kid’s quiet again. He’s sitting about seven chairs away from him, dark shaggy hair, an earing in one of his ears. Under his long hair he’s got a baby face.

Jim’s looking at him and waiting for something else. Doesn’t matter to the kid. He doesn’t say anything else.

John Smith starts up again. "Anything anybody’s got to add?"

Jim looks away from the kid back to him.

"Everything said at our meetings stays within the circle of people you see . . ."

There are two men on either side of me. One’s big, not really fat, but just built to be a big guy. The other is fit except for a small pooch of a beerbelly. Down the row from Big Guy is Janis, wearing a blood red top and white slacks. On the right side of her, a nervous little guy in a tie. The way he’s dressed is really comical, considering the way the rest of us look. Hopefully he came straight from work. Then there’s one or two of John’s buddies, one of them the hand that pressed against my chest when I arrived Tuesday night. He’s tall and lean and dark-haired. Got a pair of ears that stick out. The one next to him’s got a shadow of a beard showing and a George Michaels’s haircut. I haven’t seen them talk once during this. Then it’s the kid, then a guy looking like he’s some kind of business man, an empty chair down, the other woman, Ms. Mom. She looks calm and interested through this, like she’s sitting in at a meeting at work while they discuss new funding. Two chairs away, Jim, John, and one chair away, another man, young, sweatshirt on. Looks like a college kid. Another chair and it’s the third woman, and another guy. That’s how our circle was that night.

It’s disturbing.

How I remember this.

Why do I remember this?

John asks again.

Is this what the rest of the meeting’s going to be like?

Then a hand raises across the circle. It’s the kid.

Jim’s looking at him, expecting him to tell him why he asked about the school, what he knows. The guy’s almost leaning out of his chair, if you’ll believe that.

John calls him Ron.

"I guess since we’re talking about stuff that’s pissing us off and stuff like that . . .

There’s this teacher I’ve got . . ."

I look at Jim.

He chuckles.

Oh no.

The kid jerks his head up from the floor, up to Jim, his eyebrows drawing together.

"You got something to say?"

 

"Oh, no, go on."

"No, I think you do." The kid, Ron, straightens up. "Come on, what’s a matter? You think everybody else’s problems are trivial but yours?" He’s about to get up, and then I see him look at John and see how he’s grinning and sits back. "F**k you. F**k this."

Any other place I’ll bet Jim Lyons would of taken the kid on, but here, with John Smith sitting next to him, he doesn’t move. He just shakes his head, smiling a little bit.

John tells Ron to go on, Mr. Lyons is just upset. He’s leaning forward on his knees and smoking a cigarette.

The kid’s cheeks are red, eyes hot. He raises his head to Jim again. "I guess since you don’t want to include me in on your little confession hour, you won’t know whose they were!" he screams. "Guess you don’t want to know that, huh?"

There’s a satisfied smile on John’s face.

Jim doesn’t look at him, just at the floor, amused. You know, thinking the kid’s leading him on.

"Chris Parson!" Ron’s voice slams into the walls of the gym. "Does that ring a bell to you? Huh?" He curses at Jim some more, and Jim’s looking at him now, that smirk gone. His eyes are wider and eager and he stutters something about w-w-what’re you talking about, but not all of it comes out before the kid’s on again.

"I know who he is. I’ve went to that junior high before." He stops and collects himself, then says: "I had to stay after school one time and I was going to put something up before I left and I went walking past one of the closets. The door was open and one of the other janitors was in there with him and they stopped talking when they saw me—I mean this was probably around five when almost everybody’s gone, and I had to clean one of the bathrooms. But before they saw me I heard the guy, not Chris but the other one, say something about keeping his s**t somewhere else and he needed to get his head out of his a*s, I don’t know, something like that."

I look over at Jim, and his cheeks are pink, and he’s still looking at the kid but he’s not waiting for more because the story’s over, there you have it. He believes the kid, too. There’s not a thing on his face that says he doesn’t.

John asks Jim why he thinks Chris chose to put them in his closet. Did something happen between them before?

No, he never did anything to him. Never talked to him except maybe to ask him where something was, and maybe not even then, Jim says. "I don’t know."

"Do you think maybe that’s why? He didn’t know you enough to care what happened? Maybe the other guys knew about it, and you didn’t, and they threatened him or intimidated him in some way. Is that possible?"

Jim Lyons, looking at the floor, nods slowly. He says he was working a part time shift for a while, and this Chris could of shared his space, too.

"Hell, I wouldn’t of known . . . Maybe he just had a problem with me." He’s quiet again.

We’re all quiet.

And then John’s voice comes from the other side of the circle.

"Project One."

 

By the time we’ve established this, it’s time to go. Remember, I was late anyway? When we’re standing, pulling on jackets or getting a cup of coffee from the back table for the road, he gets our attention; he doesn’t shout. He doesn’t need to because none of us are talking.

"Tuesday night. Be here at dark."

We move toward the door. John’s in front of me. I see him clap the kid (in front of him) on the shoulder.

"Well done."

 

 

 

I’m suppose to be back in town on Sunday.

Another shipment going out on Monday.

"Project One."

My hand’s on the room phone. I’ve got a phone card lying next to it.

My hand doesn’t move off of it.

You know, I remember telling myself, you do have vacation time.

It’s eleven o’clock Saturday morning, and I know my boss’ll be at home, most likely.

Well done.

That smile on John Smith’s face.

I pick up the phone and dial everything I’ve got to before I get a hold of him.

He answers.

I tell him. Seems like the only time I can stand hearing his voice’s when I’m not working.

He hesitates with his answer. "Well . . ."

I feel the old anger working into me.

"Well, vacation time . . . you’ve got . . . 168 hours of vacation time left—two weeks." He sighs. I hate that sigh. "I guess if you want to use it I can have Jay run it for you this week. All right?"

That’s fine, I say. I don’t thank him (no reason to), but I at least force myself to say goodbye before I hang up.

I sit back on my bed and think about how I haven’t had a vacation for probably three or four years.

 

 

 

I spot the man (sitting at one of the breakfast tables with a full plate in front of him) from the other end of the hall. I ignore the "good morning" from the desk clerk and keep my eyes on him as I come into the breakfast area—there’s two counter tops running along two walls in the back, connecting in a 7 shape, and the breakfast tables sit within them. Looks like eggs, sausage, and muffins this morning plus the standard fruit and coffee and all that.

His table’s one of the closest to the doors. I don’t turn to see if he sees me but keep heading to the food and grab a plate. It’s early enough so only a few older couples are dining. There’s a younger man at the back where I am, looking it over and seeing what’s out, probably so he can decide whether to stay or take his family over to Denny’s. He’s wearing a red Kansas City Chiefs hat and a shirt to match.

I pick up a couple of muffins, eggs, one or two sausage links. They look like greasy tumors on my plate. I get a cup of coffee and pick out the table farthest from him. I don’t want to socialize, I don’t want to talk about our smoking meetings.

The Chiefs fan leaves the counters in disappointment.

Doesn’t matter if I want to or not, socialize. I’m facing the opposite direction of his table, looking at the breakfast bar, when I see something out of the corner of my eye. I turn my head and the next thing I know the man’s greeting me and plopping his tray down at my table. He’s the nervous little guy in a tie from Thursday night’s meeting. I mutter hi back to him.

"Mind if I join you?"

What’s the chance, staying at the same hotel?

Yes.

No, go ahead.

He sits and smiles at me. His face is pink and rough. Rosacea, or whatever they call that. His teeth are yellow from our addiction.

"I’m Michael Weeks."

Waiting for my hand.

Henry Redding.

I give it to him.

We poke around our plates. Michael says something about needing goggles to eat the sausage, and I smile.

"What did you think about Thursday’s meeting?" he asks me later.

I’m surprised, really. He’s not acting like the nervous guy I saw that night. Doesn’t seem like the same person, actually.

I’m not sure what to say so I tell him something like it was different.

"Yeah," I remember him answering me.

I ask him how long he’s been going.

"This will be my second week."

Oh. Does he know where the next meeting will be?

"John will let us know," he says. "Today sometime."

We eat without talking for a while. I’m glad all the older people around us seem to be minding their own business.

Can I ask him something? I say this mostly to get him away from his food. Guy’s eating like he’s been locked in solitary for a year. The meeting’s really don’t have anything to do with smoking, do they?

"I don’t know . . . Look at them as a way to better your life all together."

This still didn’t tell me anything, and actually, I didn’t ask him more about it. I was kind of scared of the answers I might get. Not like I’d let myself know I was.

Last but not least I ask him what Project One meant.

He smiles a little bit. "A project . . . I don’t know. You’ll see."

Then we move on to something more interesting, like the weather.

 

My heart’s doing its thing again, like it always does before our meetings. Feels like I’ve

just ran the distance to the motel 6 where John told us to meet from my hotel when I pull in. Room 7. He told me last night on the phone to go to the front desk if I don’t remember the room, ask for Terry Michaels.

I get out and go to room 7, knock three times, and the door opens and Jim Lyons’s standing there.

Janis, Michael Weeks, and the two men who were on both sides of me at our last meeting are sitting on one bed. John Smith sits on the end of it, looking down at a briefcase on his lap open to two pistols, separated by a strip of cloth from the tube-shaped objects underneath. There’s the other woman sitting on the other with the kid. Somebody tells me to take a seat because we’re waiting for the others.

The room glows yellow with the bedside lamp. I’m sitting next to it, across from Janis. Her face is shadowed. She’s looking around me at the front door, probably, or Jim Lyons. He’s leaning against the wall behind the door.

John closes the case and cuts the stares he’s getting. Then he’s opening it again and reaching for the stack of glossy papers he forgot behind him on the bed.

"I’ll take this time to introduce everybody." He splits the stack, puts one half under the guns and the other over them. John closes it, looks around, and stops across from me. "Some of you recognize her I’m sure." He grins. "This is Janis Cohn." Over. "Michael Weeks. Next to him, Joe Adams, David Harnell."

Joe Adams was the big bald sucker on one side of me. David Harnell was the average man on the other.

He goes to the bed I’m sitting on. "Helen Summers." The nervous woman. "Ron Landee." The kid. "Henry Redding. Jim Lyons on the wall, of course."

John sits forward and lights a cigarette. He offers the pack around and nobody takes one.

"Oh, you guys are doing so well," he says in a falsetto voice. The kid laughs down from me. "And sorry we’re out of beer."

We listen to another car pull up, then a knock. It’s one of the guys that know John pretty well, the one with the big ears. The man’s introduced as Keith Hartmen. He nods.

We wait. It doesn’t look like much more are going to show after about fifteen minutes.

Later John undoes his case and picks out one of the papers and shows first Hartmen, then Janis, and she starts giggling. I can tell by the grin on Jim’s face he’s already seen it.

The college guy is the last to arrive.

Now the only thing we’re waiting for is dark. Before we leave, John stands up.

"All right," he says. "We’re heading up to St. Joe tonight. We’re going to help out our friend Jim, okay? We’re going to the school there. Ron should help us around, and just listen for what to do. We’ll take Hartmen’s car and Janis’s. Somebody might end up with the b***h seat, but I think we’ll be okay . . . Anybody who doesn’t want to go can stay here. We might need somebody behind."

I stand with the rest of them, and the only one left sitting is Helen Summers.

". . . I think I’ll just . . . stay here," she says before John can ask her.

He’s fine with it.

We leave.

 

 

It takes us about forty-five minutes to get to the elementary school. Except for two cars

the parking lot is deserted. We wait while Hartmen goes and checks them out, looking for kids out parking, mostly.

Empty.

John turns around from the passenger seat to me and Joe. He face is a black circle in the dark.

"Okay, stay quiet. If we run into somebody, we allow no survivors." He laughs whether he sees our reactions or not. "No, if we see somebody we’re getting out. Don’t talk to them, just get out." He opens his door, steps out. We follow. Soldiers following our lieutenant.

Hartmen’s load gets out—Michael, Ron, David, and Patrick. Joe stays watch for our car, Michael for the other.

It’s John, Janis, Keith Hartmen, me, Jim, Ron, and Patrick Small. Lucky seven. We cross the pavement, going toward the metal doors in the back of the building. Jim says they’ll take us into the cafeteria. When we get to the doors, I’m fourth behind the kid. John looks in through the door windows; the cafeteria is black. John crouches down to get one of his guns out. It has a silencer on it.

Fires once.

It’s enough to get somebody to come running, but not as bad as it’d be without the silencer. One hole left in the window.

Nobody comes.

John accepts the duty of shattering both windows with the corner of the case gladly and reaches in to move the metal security bar. We hear it clang against the floor.

One more look back into the parking lot, and we’re going inside.

The place’s clear. The halls are dark. The only light there is is from the red exit signs over the doors. They reflect puddles of blood at every end of the halls. Jim and Ron still know where we’re headed. The school’s not big; must be another somewhere in town. We move down the halls without flashlights.

It’s a plain door on the right side of a shorter hall, away from the classrooms. There’s a sign plastered on it of a hand. Custodial Employees Only. John unlocks the door. I don’t know where he got the key from. The way it’s shaped it’s got to be a master key. He passes out four flashlights from the case before he opens the door. By now I know what’s going on, and I want to go in just to see it all take place, but Hartmen steps into the room with Jim. I’m handed a flashlight.

The closet door closes.

One of us at the end of this short hall, down past the janitor closets. One at the beginning where we turned, one at each side of the door, and another at the end of the hall joining this one.

"Be quiet and keep the flashlights away from your face, especially if someone sees you. If that happens, call down. Plus, look up. They’ve got cameras rolling 24/7."

I get a spot on one side of the closet door. There’s John on the other side, a few feet down.

There’s the sound of paper shuffling around and talking and one of them laughing.

John looks over at me, and he’s grinning. It’s the kind of grin that reminds me of highschool and things we did. He shines his flashlight at me. "Tag."

I remember smiling, shaking my head. Out of nowhere a thought lapses into my head, and automatically jumps from my mouth:

"Just think about some of them if you would of had beers back at the room."

He makes an amused sound. "Michael Weeks." Another one of those sounds. "We never would of made it because he would of had me stopping every two miles so he could piss."

I laugh. The sound is foreign.

"Nervous guy. Likes his beer."

I hear Jim and Hartmen moving around in there. I can barely see Janis down at the other end of the hall, or the kid on the other. They’ve got their lights turned out. For some reason I’ve got the feeling Janis turns her head my way.

What are we doing here?

I turn around when I think John’s looking off some other way and try seeing into the closet through the little square glass window at the top of the door. They’ve got the lights on in the room. But he catches me just as I am. John grins a little and reaches for the knob.

"You want to see what’s going on, do you, Henry?"

I stand back as he reaches for the door.

"We’re helping Jim, that’s what we’re doing."

The door opens, and I see Jim and Hartmen are taping pictures around the room. There’s a pile of them scattered across the middle of the floor, and they’re going back to them to get more. Pictures of nude women, men, pictures of himself, this Chris guy, sometimes together in crude sexual acts with them. I wonder how they got the latter ones. I wouldn’t think the man’s stupid enough to have some of himself in the mix. With the grin on his face (pure vicious ecstacy), Jim says he’d be just the man to help with that. Hartmen’s just there to help him in getting them all up in time. They’re both laughing as they do it, and I can’t help myself either, looking at some of them. I’ve never seen a man smile the way Jim was smiling, and after they had the pictures up, it still wasn’t quits for him. Hartmen goes out, and Jim finishes the job; he tears everything from the shelves and throws it across the room. Trashes the place. John pulls me back so I don’t get hit with something, and to push a can of spray-paint into my chest. He throws them down the hall to the others. I stand there watching him uncap one for himself. He doesn’t look at me, just the canvas of wall in front of him.

I uncap mine and start on the wall down from him. The smell of paint stings in my nose.

I still hear Jim breathing hard behind me.

My message:

CHRIS PARSON SUCKS C**K

John finishes after me and moves off to another part of the hall.

I see somebody fly past me after John. I follow until I get to the closet doorway again. A few pictures hanging are tore down, but most still remain, lining the wooden edges of the shelves and the walls and scattered in and over the computer desk in the corner. To top it off, the cherry on this mess, Jim picks up one that’s fell (Chris Parson French kissing a dog) and plasters it to the computer screen with rubber cement. The hell of it is (I’ll learn this later) is it’s a photoshopped version of his boss’s dog, or so they say.

Jim decides it’s time to go and almost runs me over on the way out. I follow after him, and John yells for the others.

I realize why we’re running when I look over my shoulder. Two figures are following us. Janis’s keeping up next to me.

I turn around again when we get to the end of this hall, and they’re at our heels, two men, tall, lanky. Nothing the seven we’ve got couldn’t take if we had to. I remember thinking that. It was pretty close to what happened, really.

They’re yelling at us to stop.

I’s not doin nothin, sir. Honest!I think I’m laughing now. I’m laughing at the way things happened, mostly. First I’m going to John Smith’s Tuesday and Thursday-night meetings to quit smoking, and then I’m running down the hall of a place I’ve never seen and aiding a man I hardly know put up pornos of the man who ruined his life because it’s suppose to help him.

 

We’re coming into the cafeteria.

That’s when we come to the hiccup in our plan, when there’s a thud behind us, and the sound of it means one thing: a body hitting the floor. We look back, but we’re still running, at least until we see one of them’s got Patrick, our tail, up against a wall. The taller guy’s screaming something into his face. Then John’s breezing on past me before Patrick gets slugged a second time. They’re looking for trouble. Probably drunk. What they’ve got here in the matters of business who could tell. Doesn’t matter. John’s tackling the tall guy to the floor. Jim’s taking on the shorter one. A fair match before Hartmen goes for the taller dick, who’s on John and slugging him in the face. The tall guy turns around and meets Hartmen’s fist. Patrick’s still on the floor, holding his stomach, and standing over him is Jim with the other guy pinned against the wall, and he’s bashing his nose. I can’t see the blood in the dark, but I know it’s there. I can only hear the yelling and the slaps of fists meeting bare skin.

I remember Jim screaming, right before he got bored with the guy’s nose and went for his stomach with his knee instead. But it’s not a pained scream, or even an angered scream. There’s something in it that almost sounds like victory.

The exit door bangs shut and Janis is looking out of them. She yells at them to stop, which’s good to hear for the guy Jim’s working over. I have a second when I wonder what’d happen if they killed them, these two guys. Who knows if the same thing crossed any of their minds, but they get in a few more and come running, helping Patrick up along the way.

Then we’re banging out of the school, and Joe’s switching places with John to the back, and we’re swinging back onto the highway in front of Hartmen’s car. Joe’s asking for details, what the hell happened.

I’m in the passenger seat and just starting to let Joe in on it when a police cruiser pulls out behind us. I tell John. He looks up into the rear-view and slows down from eighty. It’s getting us on speeding, nothing else, but I think of John’s busted-up face, and then the connection wouldn’t be hard to make.

John knows this.

The next thing I know he’s got his hand wrapped around the stick between us, and he’s pressing seventy.

Eighty.

"Let’s see how fast I can get this baby to go," he says.

The lights on the strip are blurring by in two golden streaks on either side of us. Hartmen’s closing in on our fender.

John moves up to ninety.

My hand tightens around the armrest under the window.

But at the same time . . . I’m untouchable.

It’s freedom.

 

We stop at a bar back into town, when we’re just starting to come down, to celebrate Jim’s step forward. The drinks are on Hartmen, and since it’s for Jim, I go in and have a few. The place is almost deserted.

We toss cheers to Jim.

And more cheers.

An hour or two later—I’m not sure which, like hospitals, bars seem to’ve got a time warp inside of them—and we’re not so rowdy; heads are lying flat on the bar top. The only one I remember not slammed (and wasn’t close to it) besides the kid (playing pool at the tables behind us) was Joe Baldy, sitting a stool over and bringing up conversation with me when he could. I don’t know if he was voted designated driver or what, but he looks like the kind of man that could have a wife and some kids at home waiting up for him. I’ve only had three or four beers.

After a while I ask him if he’ll take me back to the motel to get my truck, if he doesn’t mind. I don’t want to wake up to find a complete stranger looking at me from the sidewalk. Joe grins and says sure.

"You sure you don’t want me to stay and help you load them back?" I ask.

"I have to run them back to his apartment anyway. If nothing else Ron can drive the other car," he says to me. "John cancelled his room after Helen left."

I tell him if he doesn’t want to stay much longer it’s pointless; we’ll get Ron to help us load them in, and I’ll take Hartmen’s car over with him.

A beer apiece, and that’s what we do.

I follow Joe in John’s car and listen to the college kid Patrick babbling in the back seat next to Jim. Janis is slammed, even.

The place Joe takes me to is a high apartment building on the west part of the city. It looks like a hotel.

It takes the three of us about fifteen minutes when we’re taking two of us to one person. Some of them come around enough to walk.

 

Joe drops me off and the police cruiser is swerving into the parking lot minutes later. It stops at my truck as I stand there, dumbfounded.

Instead of five men leaving the vehicle with their pistols raised on me, one cop, the one from the driver seat, opens his door and gets out.

I’m seeing John and Hartmen and Jim and the school guys in my head.

I see more than one window blind snap up across the lot.

"May I see your ID?" he asks.

The best thing I’ve learned to do when you’re dealing with the fuzz is to do what they say.

So I’m surprised that I try to run. I’m thinking about John and what the group will think if I’m arrested. Then a hand tightens around my arm as I lunge forward, and I know it’s all over.

I take my license out, a ticket earning me a free ride to the police station.

Why am I under arrest?

One explains to me from the front seats before we get moving that I’m not charged with anything; I’m needed for questioning.

Fair enough, I guess.

I see her as soon as I come into the room. It’s a small square lobby area outside four doors. There’s one big desk in the middle of the room and more chairs lined against the wall. She’s sitting in one of them. I’ve got to think before I remember her name’s Helen Summers, from our group. She’s looking back at me. They seat me in the furthest chair from her, the last one in the row, like kids waiting in the office to tell their side of the story to the principal. They tell me somebody will be with me and leave.

I look over at her and nod. She does the same back.

I ask her if she knows what’s going on, even though I do already, no doubt about that. She shakes her head.

Ms. Summers acts like she wants to say something else, but I see her stop herself. She knows if she says one word about John or anybody else here, in front of the police officer at the desk, it’s all over for us, not realizing if the man would of been listening when I asked if she knew what was going on it’d be too late.

I nod and look away, in the case she does try to go on because she thinks I want her to.

We wait.

The cop at the desk raises his head and eyes me, goes back to his work.

The place is deserted, mostly because of the hour.

All four doors are closed. There’s a window in the wall for one, and I can see a woman on one side of a table crying while she talks to the cop in front of her.

I’m waiting for somebody to come to me. She’s waiting for her ride. Might as well make small-talk, even if I’m not a social guy. Hey, I guess I figured, she’s in our group after all.

I ask her where she’s from.

Her eyes keep going back to the desk cop.

"Here . . . Born and raised." Ms. Summers looks at me. Her eyes are green inside her exhausted face; she’s got a narrow nose, black hair, weathered cheeks.

I’m still pretty calm with the beers I put down. Call me Mellow Yellow.

I tell her I’m from the east coast (which’s true for the most part). My dad worked at a factory, and my mother was stay at home during the week and a waitress weekends. Moved west when I was a little older.

Helen nods and I’ve got to ask her about herself before she’ll speak up on her own.

"My parents were from Michigan."

I don’t look away from her. "Why are you so shy? Just like that?"

I can see the woman getting up in the first room.

"I guess so,"—not looking at me.

"Yeah, okay," I say.

She’s looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

The cop and the woman are coming into the lobby, and then it’s my turn.

 

The questions basically go like this:

do you know John Smith?

I don’t want to answer any of these questions, I say.

Why were you coming back to the Motel 6? Where were you tonight?

I wonder what Helen’s told them. With what they’re asking me, it doesn’t seem like much of anything.

Do you know the woman outside in the lobby?

I don’t know who she is.

Do you know where John Smith was tonight?

Do I know him?

Do I know Jim Lyons?

"Look," I say. "I know I’m part of your investigation, but you’re asking the wrong guy because I don’t know who these people are you’re talking about. I just came back after running errands in town."

A little later he finally gives up and takes me out of the room.

The police cruiser takes us back to the motel. As it turns out, I’m her ride home. The cop who drops us off doesn’t know that. He thinks we don’t know each other and her car’s here. Wrong on both. She gets into my truck when the cruiser’s down the road hesitantly.

The only thing she says to me is where she lives at in town, nothing about what happened with the group tonight—it’s like she thinks a cop or two are hiding in the bed of my truck. For what it’s worth, I tell her anyway, about the school, the pictures, the two guys, and me and Joe taking them home. We’ve got plenty of time because she lives on the other side of town. She sits pressed against the door.

We’re a mile or two coming on her house when she speaks up and tells me yes, she’s always like this. I can see her looking down at her hands out of the corner of my eye. That’s it.

I don’t press her anymore because I’ve stopped caring, really.

I don’t care.

Until we pull into the drive of her little place, and she blurts out she use to not be like this.

I ask her if she wants to talk about it or what.

Like John says, might as well get it off your chest.

She barely knows me, so I wouldn’t blame her for not wanting to tell me anything. But I think if people are desperate enough, they’ll tell anybody that’ll listen. I must of been that person for her.

We’re sitting in her driveway but she doesn’t get out.

"I started working at the place I do now twelve or thirteen years ago when I was in my late twenties. That’s record time because of the lay-offs." She pauses for a while. "I got married when I was sixteen. He was a nice man. He just . . . he wasn’t as nice when he drank. He was the kind of man the older folk call a ‘mean drunk.’ That’s how they described him, but I didn’t believe them because Mark was never drunk around me, you know. Then we got married and . . . he was a nice man, but he just . . . drank too much."

I’m nodding, trying to keep her going on. The only way I figure she went on was because this was a practice turn before she was going to tell it in front of our group, not because I was nodding.

"But my whole world revolved around him. I thought if it didn’t he’d leave me, and I knew if it didn’t he might get mean because I knew how he acted . . . even though I don’t think he touched me more than once . . . Verbal. But I loved him, and I wanted to stay with him.

"He died five years ago. Heart attack."

"I’m sorry."

"I was used to being married because I had been my whole life and I was lost, you know.

"Anyway, I had a friend that helped me. Nights were the hardest, so I took up the night-shift for a while so I wouldn’t have to be there. It turned out, there was a different man in charge for that . . . and that’s . . . probably when the trouble started."

There are tears in her eyes, but her voice doesn’t waver.

"What kind of trouble?"

Her hands are gripping each other.

"What kind?"

"He told me if I didn’t let him he’d fire me from the whole factory completely, but . . ."

She’s crying too hard at this point to go on, so I let her cry.

I’m glad when she picks up again.

"I really . . . I really didn’t want to get fired from the night-shift, especially because I couldn’t go home . . . and lay in our bed alone and think about him, and then in the morning I’d reach over on his side and tell him to get up for work." More crying. "Which . . . letting him

touch me wasn’t a big deal because I thought he thought I was really something . . . And then later on I saw what was really going on."

My heart’s aching for this woman.

"I saw what was going on."

Her words are like wails.

"How long?"

She won’t tell me.

"You still work there?" I ask her.

She doesn’t answer me at first; she says he didn’t start "the major stuff" (she calls it) until she was halfway through her second year on the night-shift. But, no, she quit and went back to the day-shift.

I ask her if she still sees him even during her shift.

Helen starts crying harder and the strength of her sobbing and the way she’s shaking tells me sometimes things aren’t much different.

"So why haven’t you left? Just quit, go somewhere else. There’s more factories . . . Is he threatening you?"

"No, no—I’m going to quit—I was already thinking about it, I’m going to quit. I’m going to."

"Why haven’t you already?"

"I’m going to," she says again and pushes the passenger door open. I call after her because we’re not done, but she’s walking to her house. I watch the front door close behind her.

I sit there a while, looking after her with my hands on the wheel before I start my truck

and head for my hotel.

I don’t sleep very good that night.

 

 

 

I’m woke up around three the next afternoon by a knock at my room door. I lay there, and they stay there, until finally I’ve got to get up. The voice on the other side of the door is

saying they’re Michael before I get a chance to look in the peek hole, even. Sure enough it’s him.

I let him in. It’s the first time I’ve seen the guy in a plain t-shirt and shorts. First time I’ve seen him looking like complete hell. At least I’m not the one with the hangover.

The first thing he says to me is, "What did they ask you last night?"

I lean against the closet door, looking at him. I’ve got to think a little before I know what he’s talking about. At first all I could see was Helen Summers, head down and crying in my truck.

"They asked me about John and Jim."

"What about them?"

I’m rubbing my eyes, still trying to come awake.

"If I knew them, and what they were doing last night."

"Is that it?"

"Yeah . . . and like what I was doing at the motel, if I knew Helen."

"What did you tell them?"

"I said they were asking the wrong guy because I didn’t know any of them . . . and I was coming to get my car after errands. You know if they’ve talked to Joe?"

"No," Michael says.

I ask him how they know the police talked to me.

"They’ve been driving past John’s apartment all morning. Was Helen questioned?"

"Yeah."

"Did she tell them anything?"

It’s too damned early for this.

"No."

He nods. "Okay," he says. "The only way they could know is one or both of the men from the school went to the police. No one else was there."

"What’re we going to do about it?" I ask.

"John’s figuring something out. We need to get on the phone and call Joe and see if he was picked up. Do you have something to drink in here?"

No. Drink machine’s down the hall.

I get out the list of numbers John gave me sometime before while Michael’s leaving and try to get a hold of Joe.

He picks up on the fourth ring. I tell him it’s me, and I wanted to know if the police talked to him last night.

His voice seems alarmed. "No, why?" Little ones are yelling in the background.

"The two men went to the police, probably. Somehow they found out, but John’s suppose to take care of it. If they talk to you, you don’t know John or any of us, okay?" I

remember turning around after this and looking at Michael sitting on the bed with a Coke to see if what I said was okay. He nods.

"Just don’t worry about it because they’ll figure something out."

"Okay."

I tell him I’ll call him if something happens or somebody will and hang up.

Michael scoots back on the bed and leans back on the headboard and opens his Coke. I ask him what he thinks John’s going to do about it.

I wonder how long he plans on hanging around.

Like before, the only thing he says is John’s figuring something out.

Fair enough.

 

 

 

And figuring something out he does.

Somebody calls me and tells me what’s going on, or what isn’t, really—the police cruisers are gone, nobody’s been picked up. The only thing I can come up with is charges are dropped, the two guys must not want to keep going with all of this. None of us know why.

Just that John’s been "figuring something out."

 

A few weeks go cruising by before our next project. I’m working through the beginning

or end of weeks, shipping loads out to somewhere, and then back to Kansas City. I usually make one meeting a week at least, even though they’re nothing too big, you know. They’re us talking about nothing with each other, just chatting, and then John talking about lives and happiness,

satisfaction, society, and what’s accepted and expected. Sociology and physiology taught right. Taught honestly.

Society is an illusion. We’re not a whole. Everybody’s top layer (the layer of them that would belong to the society we think of) isn’t the same, but I think we come down to the same wants and the same fears, and that’s the real society.

Happiness is an illusional feeling, and it’s human nature never to be satisfied, isn’t it?

 

 

 

Thursday night comes.

We’ve got our usual turnout (I’ve heard John and Hartmen make sure we keep out new members after the first or second meeting), everybody but Helen. I look around the room, and she’s not any face I see.

We’re meeting in a storage room at the back of the bar John’s friend owns that we stopped at after Project One. There’s a cooler of beer in the middle of the circle. I’m sitting next to an empty chair and David Harnell—he’s an older guy, in his fifties. Hard, redneck type.

Tonight it’s the kid’s turn.

The first half an hour we talk, about our families, friends, jobs, the stupid things we’ve done. John calls this "our time to get to know each other," until we’ve been meeting for a while. When they’re talking about friends or family members they have I’ve got to tell them about my dad’s brother (the one who died of cancer when I was kid) and the time when him and his wife

lived next to her parents, his mother and father-in-law. Instead of buying their own phone (must of been cheapskates) they used Uncle Keith’s at his house. They would just wonder over when they needed to make a call, and if somebody needed to get a hold of them, they would call his house. His wife’s mother was an Avon lady. One day she was over using their phone to take down a big order, and he was sitting in his chair in the living room. Finally he got so tired of people calling and hearing her he got up out of his chair and ripped the phone out of the wall while she was still on it.

Call me Mellow Yellow.

But now the stories are done with.

It’s the kid’s turn.

Tonight it’s about the kid.

He takes a drink of his beer and looks around for a second, especially at Jim Lyons. I’m guessing this’s the story he wanted to tell last meeting. But Jim looks peaceful tonight, like he’s going to keep his mouth shut this time.

"All right," Ron says. " . . . What I’ve got to say might not be as big of a deal to the rest of you like it is to me . . ." Another look at Jim. "But I’ll say it anyway." He pauses. "I think I’ve wanted to make my mom happy since I was little. She had a hard life, and all she wants to see is me get through school and then maybe college. Seeing me go through college would be like a dream come-true, but she said it’s all right long as I get out of high school . . . And I’m doing okay. I think I had a B average starting high school.

"Then at the beginning of this last year, my sophomore year, she started dating again. I didn’t know that the man she was dating was my physics teacher until the school year started."

I remember Helen in my truck then when he says this—"and that’s probably when the trouble started."

"I didn’t have a problem with him until a week or two after they were together, and he hit her. I crashed before she got home that night, and then, when I woke up and went to see if she came home, I found her in the kitchen cooking breakfast, and she was fine, right, but both of her

eyes were black and her lip was split . . . I waited until she went to work and then I called the police. I think they picked her up at work so they could ask her about it. A little later they came around and got me, and I found out at the station my mom lied about the whole thing and no charges were going to be filed.

"Then I go into my physics class and guess who’s sitting at the teacher’s desk.

"He spent the night sometimes or she’d go over there or they’d go out somewhere. Sometimes she’d come home looking worse than she did that morning I reported him. I tried talking to her, but all she’d say was Kevin could be a heavy drinker."

I see Jim’s face. He’s looking like maybe he shouldn’t of chuckled the time before.

"I threatened him once or twice. What else could I do?

"And I guess the next thing that happened was my grade card. I came home, and she had it. She wanted to know why I was failing physics. She monitored my grades a lot, or tried to. I said I didn’t know because I was getting everything in, and that was the truth. But I knew why.

Kevin just told her something about me not putting effort into my work, and I pointed out the bunch of bullshit that was and neither of them listened . . . But it got better magically. I was up to a C over the next few days, and I wasn’t doing anything different. I kept the gradecards.

"So then I started watching her come home looking like before, sometimes bad, a lot of the times not, and it didn’t happen as much, but it was still happening."

Somebody in our group asks him why the guy would beat her around like that.

"Guess he had a bad anger problem.

"And I knew what he was doing—it was either keep good grades and she’d be proud of me and proud of herself, but see her face bruised on occasion, or flunk if I reported him, and see her mad at me and maybe still the same way. It was his word against mine."

Somebody asks him what’s going on now.

"Same thing. That’s why I’m here."

 

 

 

Ron’s story lays out our Project Two for Tuesday night.

I call my boss and let him know I’m taking another week for vacation. He sighs, but, what can he do?

Actual evidence.

That’s what John says we need to get, and what we need to get it with is only a few guys. John picks out me, Hartmen, Ron, and the only woman now—Janis. I ask John over the phone why he needs me to help out (not that it’s a thing I can’t do, you know), and he tells me it’s because I "know how to handle myself," and I can keep my trap shut, and, besides, he says, "I know you’re taking work off, so what else do you have to do?"

He calls the four of us only, doesn’t say anything about "Ron’s project" to anybody but us. At least he doesn’t need them now, he says. Nobody really cares anyway. A lot of them just think it’s nice to have other guys to talk to and drink free beer with.

This time I get a knock about noon on Monday. I know who it is, of course. I unlock the door and they come in—they’re picking me up because they’re not taking any chances with my car hanging around anywhere they are, if the people know John or me. He’s carrying the same case, or one that looks pretty identical to it. I see it and automatically I go over the plan again in my head, like they’ve told me more than once before. We’re out to get evidence with cameras not much bigger than your thumbnail. Ah, the convenience of modern technology. From what I’ve heard, John gets these little gadgets from a guy he knows who works downtown at a pawn shop.

Before we leave, John opens the case on the bed and shows me four household safety items like smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors, and a few of the cameras themselves. Ron took pictures of what we could switch in his house.

We leave. Janis and Hartmen are waiting in John’s car.

The drive takes almost a half an hour to get to where he lives in town with the lunch-hour traffic. Ron lets us know Kevin doesn’t come home for lunch. We can only hope he didn’t forget something and he runs back—the school’s not a great distance from his duplex, a couple of miles at most. The duplex is nice, looks like one of those million-dollar homes on the Pacific in California, with one too many front doors. Ron’s got his key, and we go in. The place opens into the living room, longer than it is wide, leading into the kitchen, and off the kitchen there’s a wooden deck, extended over a small patch of yard. Off the right of the living room is a staircase, which goes up to the bedroom and bathroom.

Glad the guy doesn’t have a dog is all I can think when I come inside.

John opens his case on the sofa and we start.

 

Thursday-night’s meeting goes as they always do, except this time we’re meeting in the same place. That’s nice. More free beer.

John’s called everybody (later Monday night) and told them nothing’s really going on tonight; we’re just hanging out. Still trying out that "getting to know each other better."

I remember John wanted us to tell about ourselves. There must of been half the group there that night. He chooses Janis first, and my heart jumps a little, eager. She’s a looker, as my dad would of said, that’s for sure. She turns her head, her ponytail swaying away from her shoulder, and I can see the cords in her neck stand out a little. I can imagine the flesh there, warm and soft. I wonder when she looks at John if they’re more than friends, or at least have something on the side, and I don’t deny it for a second. Her voice is low and soothing.

Janis Cohn was born in Springfield, Missouri.

"We only lived there for another month after I was born and then we moved north to Jefferson City. After that I went to college here and ended up dropping out, and I stayed," she tells us, and goes on to what’s present for her, not about where she lives or works, only that she’s just filed for divorce, with no children.

My story is a lot less pleasant. Probably as typical, though. I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, and we moved from there when I was two to Indiana, where my father’s family lived. My parents split (cause: rough times and bad habits) when I was eleven, and we settled in Illinois, along the Mighty Mississippi. My father died three years later, just a year after our family got together to see my Uncle Keith for the last time. I liked my old man. Then my mother got married to another man, and things were still rocky there so I moved out when I got enough money from working. I ended up in Kansas. Nebraska. And back again. Never married. No kids, unless somebody knows something I don’t, and this gets a few grins from our guys.

That’s my story.

The story of Mr. Henry James Redding.

We go through the rest of the group the same way. Turns up, Hartmen’s got a pregnant wife, David Harnell fixes and sells used cars for a living (and the missing two fingers on his right hand were fed to his lawnmower four years ago), and Brad (George Michaels haircut Brad) found his wife at a local strip joint.

"But she was already gone in the morning before I had the chance to ask her to marry me."

Some of us chuckle. He grins, drunk, or almost there.

When the circle’s through the kid looks over at John and says, "What about you?"

There’s not a pair of eyes not on him in that second.

John’s touching the pack of cigarettes rolled up in his shirt sleeve. "Well . . . I was born in Colorado, and I moved here for the same reason as a few of you, college, for a degree in technical science, but I couldn’t continue because of the cost of things and I just really didn’t feel like it was worth it, so I quit. My parents weren’t happy, but when does that ever matter to a lot of young kids? They didn’t try to keep me in because they knew they couldn’t. I didn’t want to go back to Colorado so I spent some time in Nevada, between Reno and Vegas . . . I ended up coming back here."

Helen Summers isn’t here tonight, either. I haven’t told anybody what she told me that night.

Before the meeting’s over (it ends when we do) and we’re finishing the cooler, I remember John leaning forward like he does and lighting a cigarette. He takes a drag, lets it out, and looks around at all of us. "Just before we go," he says, "how many of you still think our meetings are about quitting smoking?"

He looks around for hands.

Nobody raises one. Nobody says anything.

Another exhale. "Good."

 

 

 

I leave Thursday morning to go back to work in St. Louis. Still no evidence, and I had to admit I was disappointed, but at this point I’ve got about a hundred dollars in my pocket, and when I imagine dialing my boss’s number all I can hear is that sigh.

The same faces in Goodies, the musty apartment, the bar across the highway, and the drugstore farther up.

Saturday I’m running a shipment out to Ohio.

The radio, and Jone Jet asking me if I want to touch.

Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

And let’s not forget that prick back in St. Louis with his forest-green tie.

Oh yeah.

I’m smoking less now, actually. More now when I’m back but less than before. I don’t know why. Two packs a week, if it’s worth anything.

I remember I call John Monday night on my way back and ask him about things there. I get what I’m expecting—they’re going tomorrow night; they’ve got evidence—Kevin beating Ron’s mother, the shots taken from the bedroom smoke alarm. He says they could barely keep him home. At first all they had planned was evidence to take him to court, and they sure as hell would of got the b*****d thrown in with it, but John says, "That’s all we we’re going to do, Henry . . . and then I saw the look in his eyes. While he was watching the tape."

I get back Tuesday evening, unpack, and walk across to the bar. It’s empty, mostly.

I toast them.

 

And I wake up the next day with one thought on my mind. As you probably know.

My head’s throbbing; the pain drills further into my head as I sit up. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t hurt as much because I’m more focused on the phone and trying to get John’s number out of my beruea drawer after I wake up a little.

I find it and dial his number, sitting on the edge of my bed.

He picks up the second time I call. I wonder what he was doing because his voice hardly sounds like he’s been sleeping.

"John?"

He says, "Redding, hey."

Cut the s**t and get to it.

"So what went on last night?"

I can hear the grin on his face when he talks—have you noticed that with somebody before? My cheeks are hot. He kind of laughs. " . . . Yeah, well, it went well, but, you know, ‘well,’ is not having the police called on us in my book.

"Well, we picked up the cameras Saturday night and had Ron watch them Monday, so he wouldn’t go out and do something before then. You should of seen his face. At first he cried and then—you just should of seen his face. Then last night I had him, David, Hartmen, Janis, and Brad over here around eight or nine after Ron called and said his mom and her boyfriend we’re stepping out." He pauses. "I didn’t know what else to do for him . . . We went over to Kevin’s house and waited for him. We probably went over there around midnight, but they didn’t come in until one. At first, when he came in and turned the lights on and saw us, he tried leaving, and there were some problems there, but Janis ended up taking her home. She wouldn’t of known any better—both of them were drunk. But she was a lot worse than him. Anyway . . .

I think Hartmen and I grabbed him first. We were just glad that he wasn’t anywhere close to wrecked."

He stops there.

I’ve got to know.

"How bad is he, John?"

"Pretty bad."

I try to ask what all went on from there, and he must understand me because he starts up again.

"We tied him in. I let him take most of it from there."

What did he do?

John tells me about Ron grabbing a picture of his mother from Kevin’s room and shoving it in the guy’s face. That tape must of been bad. I don’t bother asking John what was on it.

"Do you know who this is?" he screams.

The rest of the guys are standing behind, away from him, letting Ron take care of his business.

"Tell me! Do you know who this is?"

The guy—Kevin—is trying to get out of the knots, but the look on his face, John tells me, says he’s scared shitless.

Ron takes the picture away and gets up in the guy’s face. His hand closes around Kevin’s throat. He knows words won’t be worth anything.

Just like that, Ron calls in the guys and carries it out. But he gets the first. It crashes into the middle of Kevin’s pretty little nose.

He gets the second—into the jawbone.

And the third—the stomach.

"We stepped in and helped, but we let Ron have most of him," John says. A little later he adds, "Good fighter."

"How bad was he after?" I ask.

The furthest thing I can find right now to think of is my hangover.

"His face was swollen enough so he couldn’t see, and then Ron kicked him over in the chair and had him on the ground. That’s when I made him stop. The guy probably held sitting up for fifteen or twenty minutes."

"Jesus . . . How do you know he won’t turn you all in?"

"We don’t . . . He very well could, but I doubt he’ll know what happened when he wakes up. And we have the camera footage to hold against him . . . but he probably won’t remember."

"That bad?"

"Come on," John says to me. "A single punch can knock an average-sized man out if hit in the right way."

And why was I worried about it, if it wasn’t my problem? That was the better question. But I couldn’t help myself.

"He’ll know if he remembers by Ron’s voice, and waving that picture in his face."

John’s quiet for a while. "I know—I let Ron get out of control . . . but, you know, I doubt he’ll have any clear mind about what happened, and if someone happens to find him, they won’t know it was pure assault."

"What do you mean, John?"

"And it might take Kevin off Ron’s hands."

"What do you mean?"

"We planted a few ounces of coke on him. If someone comes before he has a chance to wake up, the scene only says one thing, Henry."

My throat feels dry, and I can’t swallow.

"And what’s his mom going to know?" I ask.

"What any other outsider would know if they saw him and he lies, that is, if he really knows what happened, and if he doesn’t do that, we’ll know."

"Where’s Ron now?"

"Home. If I kept him here for a while until this thing blew over it would look even funnier. And he’s making sure to keep his mom away from Kevin’s house, but with the way she was last night I don’t think she’ll be rising early." After a while he adds, "Remember, Henry, he’s the one with the drugs."

Yes.

I can’t say anything else.

The next thing he asks me is, "So when are you coming back, Henry?"—with that grin again.

I don’t know. That’s that truth.

Then, when we’re coming on some kind of close. I ask him one more thing:

do you think you’ve really pulled it off?

John chuckles in my ear.

"I guess we’ll see, Redding."

 

I waited all the rest of that day for a phone call. I hung around my apartment, watching t.v. I could see the phone (a little bit too easily) ringing next to me any second, and me, picking it up. Then John’s (or somebody from the group) voice would be there, saying, "Henry? Ron’s gone. They picked him up a second ago."

And ole second.

But I don’t get that call, and pretty soon it’s night at my apartment. Some law and order show’s on. I hate the kind, but it’s the only channel I get.

I remember falling asleep debating whether I should call John and see if anything came up.

Like you’ll bet, probably, I do the next day (Thursday).

"No," he says. "Everything’s fine, but Ron and his mom are having their differences—she saw Kevin and was asking him if he knew anything about it, but she doesn’t fully believe everything he’s telling her . . . but she doesn’t not believe him, either, because of the cover up. Ron’s sticking to that story, and she’ll come down, and so far everything is staying between the three of them because Kevin’s not the most popular guy around."

Not a lot of friends or family of his to see what happened, he means.

John’s not the only call I make, either. Mr. Bob McDougall, my boss, is second on the list. I call to see when I’m scheduled to run out our next shipment—he was a little late on that

but now he’s got it figured out. I’m sure he’s as tired of hearing my voice as I am of his. Of course I was always tired of hearing his voice.

 

Sunday, up to a big chain heath store in Des Moines. Not s**t in a plastic dish for fat chicks this time, but our usual stock (vitamins, weight supplements) and it happens to be convenient. I can have it there one day and be back the next. But, with all of the things mixing in Kansas City where the group is I don’t know if I want to go back right away. Probably not a great idea. But my mind doesn’t reject it all the way, either.

I ask my boss if he’s got anything longer somebody’s got to run.

I don’t know for sure if he thought I sounded like a kid eager to please, a student trying to be a teacher’s pet, but he says with his prissy-pissy voice, "I’ll let you know when you get back."

So I’m off Sunday morning at seven. The trip will take me six hours at least, closer to seven, and I’ll be there around (and I am) two in the afternoon. Perfect timing. Since they’re not closed, I won’t have to stay over and wait until somebody can come when I unload.

Ron’s mom is getting more suspicious, I hear.

"But she doesn’t have a lot to base it on," John says over my cell phone that night. He called me. "She’s not going to turn her son in anyway, and I hear Kevin’s healing up."

That’s good, I guess.

Before this, I remember pulling around to the back of the drugstore at the good time I mentioned a while ago. The first thing I always do before unloading when I get there is use the restroom. I don’t like to stop on short trips if I could help it. Anyway, I come out and circle around to where my truck is, and the owner’s standing there waiting for me. He waves. Looks like a nice guy. Under this, I’ve started wondering when I see people if they’re a person I’d see at one of our meetings if they got the chance. I know the type, but I can’t say how I know, or how they’re the "type" either. And I still do it sometimes. The way I look at it, everybody’s got some parts in them that qualify.

I see this guy and the way he’s smiling.

"Hi, there," he says.

I say hi, yourself and ask him where he wants me to unload.

"Here is fine."

He goes to a sliding door farther up on the building and pushes it up.

I go back to the truck, pull up farther, and start.

He talks to me while he lends a hand.

He’s the "type."

Everybody is.

I start back.

 

McDougall’s got me down for a shipment next Wednesday. I’m in the main office at one in the morning after coming to drop my truck off. I decide to take this time to write him a little note so I don’t have to hear that damned sigh that says I’ll be out of town before then, in case he needs to get a hold of me. Death in the family.

 

 

 

So here we are again.

Today it’s raining. I’m watching the rain on the window above me. Arrowsmith’s playing low a radio from somewhere in the room.

I think I went back to Kansas City Tuesday. Must of been.

It’s David Harnell’s night.

What’s keeping you from being happy, David?

"It ain’t a real long story," he says. His southern accent is barely noticeable, hardly there except in some of the words he says. David looks like a man that’s told a few stories in his time before with a beer in his hand like he is now.

"It happened to me . . ." He pauses, drinks. "Oh, I’d say seven years ago. Don’t seem that long . . ."

We’re all sitting in our circle, like usual. I think it was the back room of Salem’s again. Ron’s here. He’s fine, everything’s all right, or at least that’s what they’re saying. I look around for Helen and don’t see her.

"I knew Rob Barkley because he was always coming into my shop . . . Still does, can you believe that? He’s always looking at the ‘59 Cadillac Elderado a buddy of mine sold to me.

Good-looking thing, all black. I’ve been looking to sell it at one of the car shows I take it around to. Anyway, most times he’s coming in for something else, something’s broke or whatever, and most times I take a look at it and see he’s been screwing around with it and then it’s my fault the sonofabitch won’t start up again. He kept coming back, though, probably because I was the only person around that would actually take a look at his stuff. I’ve worked on his cars,

chainsaws . . . lawnmowers, weedwackers, you name it. I usually helped him out long as I could.

"Well, then one day he came in—his face was red and he was sweating like a hog, big dark sweat circles around his armpits and down his back. He looked mad, but if you saw him any old time he looked the same way, but I knew he was really pissed this time. I was thinking oh great. He had his chainsaw with him . . . not the one I worked on before, a different one; it was a yellow Homelite, I think. And I knew he was mad as hell too because he didn’t even take a look at the Elderado when he came in." David laughs. "He said he got it second-hand from a guy he knew and he couldn’t get it started . . . Started the first few times, but then it just up and quit. He was like, ‘I knew I shouldn’t of bought anything off him’ and carrying on. And we’d just had a storm blow through and branches were down, so he needed it. . . . Well, I asked Rob if he had another one, and I guess that was the wrong thing to ask because he blew up. He was like, ‘Well, if I did would I be here?’ and all that. I was just like ‘All right, Rob.’"

He seems less interested in his beer now. It’s wedged in the fork of his crotch.

"He gave it to me to look at, even though I told him I wouldn’t get it done that day cause I had a whole other shitload of stuff people had dropped by, and that started another episode. Finally I just told him he could either shut the hell up or get out." David chuckles again. "And people around call him Bark cause of his temper, by the way. Instead of Barkley. I told him the best I could do was keep it and take a look at it later and then I’d bring it over to him, and he said fine and left.

"Well, now, about a week later I loaded it up in my pick up and took it over there like I said I would. I think it was a Friday night. Found out something about his carburetor, I can’t remember. Anyway, I got there and Rob came out of the house and came to my truck and I told him what was wrong with it and the charge. He paid me right there, out of the wad of cash from his pocket, and then he said he had something else he wanted me to take a look at, so he started off and that’s when all hell broke loose cause Jude came out, and she was justa yelling and nagging him about the stuff he had lying around in the yard and about giving me his things cause it was a waste of money and all that. By now she was down the porch and at my truckbed where he was headed with that motor he wanted me to look at. She was like, ‘I don’t know why all you want to do is waste our money with all that stuff you dink around with,’ and, ‘All you’re going to do is throw it out with the resta this stuff whether it’s fixed or not!’ Usually Judy’s a quiet gal, real polite, but, I don’t know, they musta been fighting that day, and she was giving him the God-honest truth, and I saluted her for it, and then Rob, he backhanded her. He just sat the motor on the ground and hit her across the face. I couldn’t say anything. She turned her head to look at him, and he hit her again, this time so hard she fell back into the ditch behind us and just laid there, and I did the only thing I could think of and grabbed the chainsaw outta the truckbed cause it looked like he was going for her again. It roared into life, and he stopped dead in his tracks, looking at me. I screamed if he got any closer to her I’d take care of him walking at all, and that’s when Judy woke up and saw me with the Homelite, walking toward him. She got up and started screaming all the way to the house and called the police. The next thing I know I’m standing in front of a county judge, being charged with attempted murder. Five years. I’ve been out for almost two, and that sonofabitch just started showing up a few weeks ago . . . Coming in with that same old s**t."

 

 

 

. . . The next thing I know I’m squatting on my hams with my hands buried to the wrist in Jude Barkley’s garden, uprooting every plant I can get and tossing them into one of the two white buckets next to me with handfuls of dirt. It’s still wet and sludgy under my fingers from the last rain.

I can hear the car roaring down the top of the hill of this country road now.

Another handful.

Was that another strawberry vine? The things spread more than syphilis at a whorehouse.

Or cucumber?

Any second.

I’ve got one filled already, the second almost half.

I tear out a tomato plant with its red fruit in bloom.

Any second . . .

The car’s moving in. I don’t look, but it’s getting louder.

I’m not the only one who hears it. The screen door on the house slams, and I see Rob Barkley come out onto his little deck as I’m getting up and starting to move for the house.

I’m just in time to see Rob Barkley’s dream car, his Cadillac Elderado, smash into the ditch in the front yard. There’s nothing but the sound of destroyed metal, bending like the folds of an accordion, and shattering glass. I (and Barkley) can’t see the front of the Elderado because it’s mashed into the ground, burrowed itself a little tunnel into the side of the ditch, but the

smoke, that we can see. Thick, white clouds float up from the ditch. There’s the cooling tick of the engine.

Goodbye Pharaoh of Fins.

I’m standing on the other side of the deck. I can hear Barkley scream out something, a long chain of curses, and he starts like he’s going back inside to call the police (or get his shotgun), right before he sees the shadow climbing up the ditch. When it stands, the both of us can see David Harnell’s face drift in and out of the smoke, and the baseball bat he’s holding, a little something extra I didn’t even know about.

David smashes the bat through the driver’s window. I can only hear this. He goes for the other windows and knocks them out, too. Rob Barkley is screaming at him to get the hell off his property, but, mostly, what the hell is he doing? The words are more like moans.

David cracks the windshield. One more blow and he’s broke through. He pulls the bat out.

Jude Barkley joins us. I’m sure as you probably betted already she’s screaming.

Then David’s on the top of the Elderado, bashing the roof in in almost defening wacks. He disappears again in the smoke. I wait until he comes back again, pick up the buckets, and make my move.

"Hey suckers!" I remember yelling at them as I ran past the deck and out onto the lawn. David takes a few more swings and starts down. "Look what I got for you!"

I let one bucket drop and keep the other one as I run. Jude and her husband look close to see what it is.

David’s screaming back to them.

"I helped weed out your garden!"

I throw the first handful at him. It flies through at them in a ball because of its wetness and explodes against the wooden railing on the deck.

"Brought to you in courtesy by David Harnell!"

He’s climbing the ditch toward the side of the blacktop.

I think I pull out a tomato then, or just mud, maybe, but whatever it is hits Jude’s flower-printed dress and covers the front of her.

Quick.

I throw another.

Not a winner.

Another.

David’s on the road, running with his bat and looking back for me.

The next time I hit Jude again I nail her neck and the mess splatters up to her forehead. I got her just when she was running inside.

I grab some more, throw it at Rob, and miss because he’s running at me now. I throw the bucket at him and run. The only thing I can drag in seems like smoke.

I move out on the road and see David ahead, and farther ahead of him, even, a red car, at the top of the hill.

"Come back and finish this, sonsofbitches!"—Big Bark back there screaming. And it’s a good thing he’s big because I’m not in much of a running shape myself.

The last look I get of Rob Barkley is when I turn back and see him standing in the middle of the road, and then—seeing this will be one of the happiest seconds of David Harnell’s life, he’ll say—turns around and looks at his dream car.

The red car slows down when it gets to us. Janis’s car, as promised. She turns around in the road and heads back toward the highway.

I think David Harnell watched that little cloud of smoke out of the back window as she did.

 

We drive back to the city. Back to the bar with the little storage room. Only a few guys are there—I think John, Michael, Jim, and Joe. They all want to know what we did or how it went. I let David tell the story, while John orders rounds of whatever we want.

At the end of the night while we’re walking (some of us trying to walk) out, John claps me on the back, much the way he did to Ron that night, and tells me "to be thinking."

That’s it. Because before I know it it’ll be my turn.

 

Of course they know who did it, and it was a straight line to David Harnell for the police.

They picked him up around ten o’clock on Thursday morning, just as I was leaving for

St. Louis again.

John calls me right before I head out the door. He says chances are they’ll be by to pick me up, too, and if they do, I’ve been friends with David since I was in

my twenties, and neither of us know John Smith, just to be on the safe side of things. Just in case. You know, if we’re linked to Ron’s physics teacher or any of that. The best thing to do is wait.

An hour later I get a call. It’s John. He tells me he’s being let off because there wasn’t vandalism to any of the Barkley’s belongings. David Harnell can’t be charged with anything because he destroyed his own property.

Except me.

"The worst they can do is have you up on a Class C misdemeanor and probably an infraction for trespassing, if anything," he tells me. "Just fines, nothing big. Small claims court, and they probably won’t even be able to find an attorney for this."

I wait then.

John said he’ll take care of the costs if it comes to that.

I sit on my hotel bed and wait.

I get that knock before noon.

. . . To shorten things up, they take me to the station and tell me what could happen: everything John already told me. In the end, since the prosecutor didn’t feel the importance of the situation as much as the Barkley’s did, I get off on a $150.00 fine.

Most expensive garden I ever seen.

 

 

 

This sets me back a few days, and I get back into my city Tuesday night. Home sweet home.

I’m off to Indiana the next day.

All the while I’ve been thinking.

About the people in my life.

About my job.

About what really pisses me off.

Needs and wants and all of that, if you can believe it—me, thinking so much just over what one man said, or told me to do.

I wonder what they’re doing now, all of the people in our group, what kind of "projects" are going on, since I’ve been noticing the way some of their eyes are different. The meeting before they weren’t like that—they were just their plain, ordinary eyes, if you can get that, and then magically the next meeting something is completely different about them. About the person. It seems like it’s in their walk, in their voice, face, smile and eyes. Like teenage boys getting to first base on the first date. You can pick them out in the group.

It was a rainy Wednesday that day I left, and I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of town.

I’m suppose "to be thinking."

Their heads turn away from John to me.

It’s the only thing next important enough to write about.

They turn to me, and they want my story. Friday night. We’ve got a full house tonight. They’re looking at me, wanting my part in all of this, what’s my story so I can be like the rest of them. I can’t say anything. My throat’s locked.

Their eyes.

Then I’m waking up at home again. Saturday morning.

I remember that dream, or some version of it—the way their eyes burned on me, that’s it.

This is the day I get the call about Helen Summers.

The phone rings around eleven. It’s not John or Hartmen, even; it’s Michael, and he tells me he’s calling to tell me what happened last night, if I hadn’t heard anything out of anybody else. This is as much of Michael’s voice as I’ve heard in a long time.

"Helen Summers tried to commit suicide last night."

My stomach drops.

That’s it, that’s all he says, no candy-coating or sprinkles to decorate it in.

The only thing I can see is her, that blue dress, her sitting in the passenger seat of my truck with one hand touching her face and the other just dead in that blue lap, crying.

Did she expect me to do something about it?

"One of the women she works with said she came in, and she went to Helen’s room because she didn’t see her anywhere in the house. Helen was sitting on the bed with a gun."

There’s a sick fascination in his voice.

I don’t ask him what he means. It can mean a lot of things.

Gun just sitting across her lap as she examines it, wondering if this’s how her last moment should be.

Gun somewhere else.

And the co-worker just happens to walk in at the perfectly right second.

All I can think is this is my fault. Maybe that’s not true, but it doesn’t change my mind.

It’s a good thing Michael goes on, because I don’t think I can talk.

"We found out from somebody in the group. I think John was trying to call her more than once this week, but he couldn’t get her. I guess the woman’s staying with her now."

He’s silent for a while.

"They wanted me to call to see if you talked to her or . . . saw something—"

"No," I say.

"All right."

We hang up.

I sit on my bed a while after that.

"Sitting on the bed with a gun."

Did she expect me to do something about it?

I know enough to know guilt puts all sorts of things through somebody’s head, but rather I know it or not doesn’t matter. There’s still that little voice, answering me.

Why else would she tell you?

 

 

I don’t sleep well that night.

I wonder if the woman who’s suppose to be staying with her’s still there.

Or if Helen sitting up, looking at that gun.

Or did that lady just overact and take something for what it wasn’t?

I’ve got a shipment going out Tuesday that I’ve got to think about, too.

Turns out, I get somebody to cover for me. I head to Kansas City instead. I’ll be able to make it to Tuesday night’s meeting, but that doesn’t matter; that’s not the reason. There’s another reason, and her name’s Helen Summers.

I get into town around four in the afternoon, and I don’t waist any time in going to see her. It’s late enough to have an early dinner, if she wants. There’s another car in her driveway when I pull in. Disappointing, but what did I expect? I debate whether I should go for a while, the truck idling there. I turn it off and get out. My legs feel weak—I don’t know if it’s from the straight drive or something else. I feel (if you want to be frank) like a horse’s a*s, running here to this woman’s house when I hear she tried to commit suicide, a woman I hardly know outside the night she cried in my truck.

Knock twice.

I wait a while, listening for footsteps, and jump when a big woman opens the door to me. Her brows draw together. Now I’m a bigger a*s.

"Yes?"

I ask if Helen’s home, and then the woman’s opening the screen door between us to let me in and leading me across a plain living room to a hallway.

The house’s silent, even though with a woman like Helen Summers you’d expect the washer and dryer to be roaring and sheets flapping on the clothesline in the backyard and the dishwasher swishing and swashing.

Nothing.

The woman takes me to the second doorway of this short hall, the doorway of Helen’s bedroom. It’s dark with the shades pulled, but I can see her fine, of course, sitting in an armchair toward the corner with a lamp on next to her while she looks through a magazine. I’m guessing her friend was the one taking care of the house since she’s here—the type Helen looks like should be up and about. She looks up at me. I’m frozen in the doorway.

She says something first. That’s good.

"Henry Redding?"

She barely remembers my name.

"Yeah, that’s me," I say. "I came by to see you."

She’s dressed in a sweatshirt and slacks, and her hair’s in a matted ponytail lying over her shoulder. Her face’s got a faded color to it.

"Okay."—obediently. She shuts the magazine and looks up at me; her eyes are shy, and they keep moving from me. The woman, her friend, is still in the room, standing by me. I don’t ask her to leave and neither does Helen, so I ask if she wants to get dinner.

She’s already ate.

Of course.

Here I am, asking a woman out to dinner two days after she tried to kill herself.

The way she sees it, another person trying to reach out, the old I’m fine, you’re going to be fine, everything’s fine, trick.

Of course.

"Okay. Can I talk to you here?"

"That’s fine."

I look over at the woman, and she leaves the room.

I look back at Helen. The only thing I can think to say is, "You all right?"

She’s not looking at me. I can barely hear her.

"Yes."

"Is it about what you told me?"

She looks down at the magazine cover on her lap and doesn’t answer me.

"How come you haven’t been coming to any of the meetings?" I ask her.

She shrugs.

"You sure you’re okay?"

"There’s really not any point in them, is there?"

She’s quiet after this, and I can’t get her to explain. She refuses like she’s a five-year-old and just said her first bad word. I’m standing there and watching her; I don’t know what to do but this. She looks up at me again. Those exhausted eyes.

The eyes Ron must of saw in his mother night after night.

The eyes I saw in me when my uncle died.

The eyes of David’s wife when he was sentenced to prison.

I only talk when she’s looked away. Best I can do. I ask her if there’s anything I can do for her—maybe the better question, or one she could answer.

"No."

 

 

It’s Thursday night.

I look around our circle of chairs and see the grins of five or six men who’ve got black eyes, mashed lips, and missing teeth. We’re back at the Traveler’s Hotel basement where we first met. Some aren’t here at all. There’s four or five gone, as expected. Earlier I got a call from Jim Lyons asking me if I’d heard from Michael or anybody else from the group. He said he didn’t know for sure—"so don’t go saying this around to people," he tells me—but he thinks Michael might’ve killed somebody tonight.

"I heard the police found him," Jim says. "He was somewhere over in Kansas."

Another project?

They turn to me, and this time it’s not a dream.

Helen Summer’s not in the crowd again.

They’re looking at me, wanting my story.

Joe Baldy, Jim, Brad, everybody else, John across from me. Some men I’ve never seen before.

Black eyes and crooked grins.

I’ve known my story all along.

 

I was running a shipment to Arkansas. It was the first year I had been working for the company here in Missouri. Before I was a trashman, so you could guess I was pretty familiar with everybody in the little town I was living in. Knew everybody, heard everything. I never believed it (not most of it). You can’t when you live in a town like that. I heard things from the other drivers, on break at the diner, from customers, and I found out things on the job you never would of expected unless I was a teacher or barber or somebody around a lot more people everyday—Joe and Betty down the street weren’t just wearing their wedding rings because they were "too small," Ava Hamilton, the local minister’s daughter of all people, was doing more than church services on the weekends, Claudia Norton was embezzling money from the school board, and, most of all, out of everything, that Garret Sampson, a seventeen-year-old junior at the local highschool, was gay.

Everybody in town watched him grow up, and some would say they knew it from the start. I remember the first time somebody pointed the kid out to me I was sitting in my truck while the guy I worked with dumped somebody’s trashcans around back. I saw this kid go walking by—blonde, shaggy hair, skinny, tall—with a girl, but I didn’t pay them much attention until Randy came around to my window and asked if I’d seen them.

"That’s that fairy everybody talks about."

His eyes looked like they were gleaming.

So that’s how I knew what Gary Sampson looked like.

They’re silent, wanting me to go on.

I haven’t seen anything like what these old timers had against him. And they watched him grow up and had personally loved him as a son at one time or another, that was the hell of it!

I’ve thought of it a lot of the days on the road.

I was somewhere on highway 63, running down through Missouri, when I saw this red pick up behind me. Must of been following me for ten or fifteen miles, moving in and out of my view as it rode my tail. I couldn’t figure out why, when the opposite lane was clear. This probably happened between eight and nine at night, just when it was starting to get dark that summer.

The next car I saw coming in the opposite lane was a little green Cavalier coupe, and I knew, even then, I’d seen it before.

I saw the truck behind me move in my side mirror. It darted out behind me and into the oncoming lane, the Cavalier probably fifty feet ahead. I slammed on my brakes and tried to pull over, but it was too late—the red pick up smashed head on into the Cavalier before it had time to turn off out of the truck’s way completely. The Cavalier, while trying to make a last-minute turn, went flying off the side of the road, into the ditch, flipping once, twice, and coming to rest on its top. The pick up, larger, was sitting on the shoulder. I couldn’t see the driver past the erupted air bag in front.

The other driver was lying near the ditch, in the pick up’s headlights. A kid. Had to be. The body was too skinny and fragile to be an older man’s.

I got out of the truck, dialing the police on my cell phone as I did. From where I was, even, I could see this was bad. There were blood marks on the gravel shoulder, streaks that looked like dark paint, and glass and scraps of things in the mix.

And the kid.

I looked at him for a second. I felt a scream, something, overwhelming my lungs, and then I had to turn away so I could talk. I told them where I was and what had happened.

I didn’t want to look again.

I had to.

It was the kid, all right—I could see it in his face. Gary Samson. His eyes were half-open, rolling in their sockets, to me, to the sky, to my truck, the pick up that hit him, but I’m sure making sense of what just happened wasn’t what he was doing and the least of his worries. The skin on one part of his head was peeled back to reveal a big, gaping wound. There were bits of hair and bones woven into it. His face and arms, his clothing, had been cut open from the glass of the windshield. He was lying in a funny, twisted position.

I heard a car door opening behind me and turned around. The other driver was stumbling out of his pick up, looking over at me. I couldn’t think of anything else to say but for him to stay in his truck because an ambulance was coming. He didn’t listen. He kept limping toward me.

I knew the second he got to me he was drunk. I could see it in his eyes. That half-stupid grin. I shoved him back, and he tripped over his feet and fell on the road. He started to get back up, mumbling things about a f****t fairy and coming at me like he wanted to fight. He saw my face and paused and decided his truck was a better idea.

When the police and the paramedics came he was still sitting in his truck. And me, I was sitting on the edge of the road next to Gary Sampson during his final moments. He bled to death.

I found out the next day at a police station that the driver who killed him was a high-school graduate two grades above him.

"I hear he’s out now," I tell them. "I know his name, but that’s all I know about him."

That half-stupid smile.

He didn’t give the Sampson family much of an apology, even. They told me. They had wanted to meet me—me, the puppet in Gary’s murder.

The eyes of Gary’s mother.

Helen’s eyes.

And do I think the driver was aware of what he was doing? When I was asked this, all I had to say was: why else would he ride my tail like that, and only move into the other lane when Gary Sampson was coming?

"I was the puppet in his murder," I say again.

That makes me think I’m an accomplis.

Across the circle, John smiles.

 

When the meeting’s over, after everybody’s input on my part is done—some said they remember hearing about the trail, some knew the Sampson family—is done with, and a few others tell their stories, I get ready to leave. Change of plans. John tells me it’s my turn for a "night out on the town."

We end up walking to a restaurant down the street. There’s one other couple in the place.

John orders me a beer.

We sit, talking, watching the waitresses.

Eventually we get back to my story. Of course. He asks me how I really feel about it all.

I’m loose enough to talk.

I shrug, say I really don’t know.

He’s still looking at me.

"Pissed, most of all," I tell him. When I think of all the life that Sampson kid had in front of him, how he was killed for a senseless reason by a drunken local because he had something against him, I’m pissed. Saddened. The day I had to see Gary’s mother—three days after the wreck—was the hardest. I’d sat, dumbfounded, on the sofa in front of her while she cried against her husband, and asking me the same things over and over: why? and did he say anything to me before he died?

The narrow eyes of Gary’s dad.

Looking at me.

No explanation can get rid of that hate you feel.

John asks me if I’ve heard anything out of his family or the other driver.

No. I think the driver’s living outside of St. Louis still.

He looks at me for a while and asks if I still think about it.

"If you had a chance to see him and get this off your chest, would you?"

I shrug. "I guess," I say, knowing I’ve just gave him our project four.

 

 

 

I can’t help but wonder how he’s here in the motel room John picked out three days later, but it doesn’t matter as I take another swing. He drops back onto the bed, and I get him again, in the stomach.

John’s left. The room’s empty, all but me and him.

I tell him to stand up, be a man. Stand up and it won’t be so bad.

He doesn’t try.

I hit him once in the face.

He tries to prevent future blows by covering his face with his arms, but I grab them instead and drag him up off the bed and show him toward the wall.

This is me, losing control.

He sinks to his knees in the corner and tries to cover his face and head. I can see the blood on the bed sheets. It’s on the carpet, the wall; he’s smearing it everywhere.

The man starts screaming for help. He’s thirty-three, and all of a sudden I’ve brought him back to eleven years old. The pre-teen and the school yard bully. He pulls at the window curtain, and I pull it back, giving him the open opportunity to rush at me. He’s average-sized, smaller than me, but he doesn’t have any trouble getting me down by my waist. One blow to the face. He’s on top of me for a second, and then I’m tackling him back against the wall. Something falls. I can hear voices outside of the door.

He hits me again and knocks me back. I can see black dots at the corners of my eyes. I ask him if he’s proud of what he did before he gets me again. He’s screaming. No words, just screaming.

Are you proud of yourself?

Have you told your kids the bedtime story about how Daddy cracked the gay boy’s skull open?

The blood’s running down my throat as I lay there on the floor. There’s blood from his face on the fingers in his fist, which he’s mashing into me every time he hits me.

This is about me. He wasn’t suppose to fight back.

Somehow I get on my knees and tackle him down again, receiving time to stand. I kick him in the stomach.

"Proud of yourself?"I kick him in the side and listen to him gasping. My arms are smeared in the blood I wipe away from my nose. I can barely breathe with the blood in my throat.

 

This is me, getting things off my chest.

How could you do that?

Did you take a look at his parents?

Did you get a good look at him on that road?

The voices are getting closer.

He probably doesn’t even remember the way that kid looked. I’m the only one

left with that.

I kick him in the face. His head snaps upward, and he slowly drags it down, clutching his face. The blood leaking through his fingers makes the carpet under him a darker red. The thought of killing him crosses my mind for a second and then it’s gone.

The door starts to rattle in its frame. Somebody’s knocking.

"Get the hell out now," I hear John yell.

I leave the man there, and I’m out of the room and off down the front sidewalk behind John. I can hear somebody screaming behind us. I turn back and see two women and more men crowded around the room I was in, and a few more break through, chasing after us. I get into John’s car across the parking lot, and he pulls out and onto the highway. I can barely see the road because my eyes are stinging—with blood, sweat, I don’t know. John’s doing seventy

at least.

"Where’re we going?"

I can tell he doesn’t know. He’s not planned this little part of it out very good, and I can beat the s**t out of him for it.

He looks behind us, back. They’re not on us yet.

"Salem’s bar," he decides. "Unless they get behind us. Then we’ll have to lose them. I don’t know, that’s just where I’m headed."

I know Michael Salem, the bartender and John’s friend, will cover for us if we get there without them following us and they come later. I’m trying to think of the first place they’ll go to, but I don’t know. I can’t think. I can’t see because my left eye’s swelling shut. I can barely breathe. Seems like I’ve been holding it in this whole time.

I remember John turning the radio off, and the sirens wining over the car’s engine . . . I can see them in the side mirror now. We’re on other side of town by now, at a stoplight, but when John hears those sirens we fly through the intersection. The street lights and glowing signs streak past me, and I can’t help but remember the night we played a little visit to St. Joe.

Now this one: Project Five, entitled Saving Red’s A*s.

John moves around the cars in the right lane, weaving between them, and all the while they’re at the same distance behind us. Some are pulling off the road for them.

Another cruiser turns off after us farther back. It’s moving closer in my side mirror rapidly.

John’s moving on eighty, and then drops back to fifty, moves into the other lane toward the exit ramp to turn around and head the other way, barely missing one of the vehicles coming off the overpass. The cruiser behind us almost isn’t as lucky. It swerves to avoid it, buying us a little more time.

Coming down from the overpass and into another two-lane stretch. I’m looking into the mirror for them, but it looks like they’ve fell back a little, and when I turn back to the road I see John’s newest strategy to get out of this; he’s gliding up between two cars, driving the centerline. His car (small enough) only skims the side of one of the cars, pushing it over toward the shoulder, where it goes without protest. The one on the left swerves and slams on its brakes, skidding. John swerves at about the same time, onto a turnoff that leads across to the other highway, into the grass—missed it. John pulls the wheel again, turns right, and we’re facing the oncoming traffic on the other highway. I look over and see the police cruiser chasing us on the next highway over, some ways back. They’re not getting much closer . . . but they’re not falling behind any more than that.

82, 83 . . .

He’s pulling this off.

I can see the grass dividing the highways disappears farther ahead into cement paving, lined by iron railing. The highways are closer at this point. I look at John, and he’s caught it too, but he’s not showing there’s going to be any change in plans. It’s got to be that, or we’re going to have one hell of a mess if the oncoming cars don’t have anywhere to go off.

He starts slowing. I feel something close to relief.

One last chance to take the turnoff to the other highway.

The cruisers aren’t behind us. Instead they’ve cut across the grass onto this highway, speeding after us.

"John."

He follows my eyes and sees the cruisers behind us.

The turnoff.

I get his attention again, and he looks back at the road, just in time to see the STOP sign at the turnoff, and he spins the wheel right, over into it. John’s door screams against the cement curb, and he pulls left, and we’re on the highway. I look over to see the one on the right behind us miss the turnoff and slam on its brakes to keep it from going further. The other, the one following this one, flies into the turnoff, doesn’t turn fast enough and hits the curb, crushing the driver’s side with the ease of a Coke can.

 

 

If I had any sort of control, I’ve lost it when we pull into Salem’s.

The only thing I can think is I’ve killed him. John tries to catch me by the arm, but I’m already out of the car. I can see Michael at the bar through its glass, looking to see who’s coming in. I come in, all right. Come in with an entrance if there ever was one. Michael probably thought he was getting held up. Everybody inside—there’s a few men at the bar, I think—looks up at me and doesn’t turn away. There’s dried blood like a bib down the front of my t-shirt. I can feel it drying, stiffening against my chest. My face throbs, my jaws the worst, but I manage to mutter to Michael that we need to talk to him. Back room. John comes

in after me.

I don’t think I even wait until we’re back there to begin. People are watching us while John tries to get me to calm down. I can barely hear over the buzz in my head. My face throbs. I think I can hear sirens. Michael shuts the door.

"What the hell happened?"

I feel like laughing. I tell him everything, from John picking me up tonight from my motel to my little "surprise." While I’m telling him, I’m going to the two or three doors in the room and checking if they’re locked. I can hear men out in the bar room talking about me somehow.

I’m scared at this point. I’m scared for my own a*s, not that I killed him—I might’ve been hoping for it—or anything else. Not scared I might’ve pulled John into this with me (but didn’t he start it?). I’m scared for my own a*s, and I can barely hear or think or breathe, even, and then everything’s gone as I turn around and John’s fist slams into my temple.

Blackness.

 

I wake up remembering, my head throbbing. I try to sit up, but everything spins, and I

lay back down for it to try to find its normal place. When that happens, I confirm where I’m at, what happened. The room’s empty, door open. That’s not good. I get to my knees, and the vertigo starts again. My head’s a thirty-pound weight, but somehow I stand up, eyes closed, and go to the doorway, swaying while I walk and almost tripping. Michael and John are sitting at the bar smoking. I can see the sky outside in the front windows—pink. The sun’s starting to rise. I make some kind of sound because I think if I try to say something I might blow my cookies instead.

"Good morning, princess," John says. He knows what I’m thinking about and so he goes on to update me: "Nothing yet."

The room’s tilting a little when I move my head. I get John having to calm me down, but it’s a shame it wasn’t in a less painful way, with that kid’s fight to add onto it.

"Come have a seat," John says.

I settle for where I’m at—leaning in the storage room doorway with my head on its wooden frame—instead.

John blows out smoke, fogging his face a little for a second. "I think we’ll go pretty soon. What do you think?"

I can almost laugh.

"Haven’t seen anything?" I whisper.

"Nothing."

I stand there a while longer, trying to sort things out (as much good as it does me), and then go to the bar for that seat a couple cigarettes before we decide to leave. If anybody asks, things got a little crazy last night, and Michael slept here, woke up here. Didn’t see or hear anything out of anybody.

The clock in John’s car says it’s around six, I think. I remember the streets bare—not deserted, city streets can never be deserted—because of the hour, but John only takes the main highways long enough to drop me off at my motel. The rest of the way he tried to make

slum streets.

Same old room. Nobody waiting inside for me, or any cruisers out in the parking lot for that matter. I feel nothing as he pulls in but sheer relief, heart-sinking relief when it’s rose in your throat.

I watch John far as I can down the highway from the lot.

I search around for a pack of cigarettes in one of my bags when I’m inside, and when I find one I pull a desk chair to my room window and sit there for most of the day, smoking one after the other.

The phone rings for the first time (as expected) around ten, but it’s not my room telephone—my company cell phone. I can barely hear because it’s buried in one of my bags under laundry, dirty and clean. My heart skips for a second when I hear it.

It’s my boss on the phone. He says hello and tries to shoot the s**t with me, but the kind of man he is struggles with this part; you can hear the awkwardness in his voice. He cuts to the chase and asks where I’m at.

Kansas City. I had to come back to see my aunt. With the death of her son and all.

He’s quiet for a while.

"Well, Henry . . . You know you don’t any vacation or sick days left, is that right?"

No, I wasn’t aware of that.

"Well, you haven’t for a while. Henry . . . the reason I called was because I’m going to have to let you go," he says.

I couldn’t say I didn’t know that was coming.

And just like that I’m off the job. Twenty-one years into nothing.

In a way, I’m free. There’s no reason to go back but that s****y little apartment across from the bar.

I go back to my chair at the window and sit thinking. I think about that young man, the bar of his cheekbone under my knuckles on that first hit. Maybe he knew that was coming from the start from the look I saw in his eyes when I first came into the motel room for my little surprise. Not that he probably recognized me. No, I don’t think that. He had guilt written all over his face, like they say, and he knew what he had done, and the only reason he’d be here is to be punished.

I was fine until I saw that half-stupid grin. That grin, looking at me, across from him on the bed, smoking one of John’s Luckies, thinking of what to say first (do you know who I am?

or how could you’ve done that?), and I looked up at him, looked up to that damned grin.

"What’s this about?" he asked, like he didn’t know.

My first blow rocketed him off of the bed.

Eventually he tried to put up his own fight. I got the best of him, though; you can bet that.

While I sit there, going over the scene in my mind, I thought I could almost remember seeing a flicker of recognition in his eyes at one point.

I watch the cars on the highway for cruisers. So far I haven’t seen one. I feel relaxed anyway, light, relieved. I start thinking about John and how far did he have to go to get that guy, and then somehow my thoughts circle around to Helen Summers. With the way I’m feeling, something seems to fade into view again in my mind, something I’ve seen before. I see her eyes, weathered cheeks, and there’s that voice, always that damned voice:

she knew you for one day . . . why else would she have told you?

Yes, she wanted you to tell.

Why you? Maybe you looked like the kind of man that would do something, or would listen at least so she didn’t have to be alone in the thought, and you did, didn’t you?

There was something she saw, and she chose you.

 

 

 

If there’s room for one last project before I get out of town, this is it.

I had my moment, and now I’ll have another for her.

The factory parking lot is clustered with night-shift vehicles. I wonder if Helen’s is with them, if she ever really switched over to days.

The weight of one of John’s pistols in my waistband feels good. And when I’m being handcuffed by police, and they want to know what I was thinking, all I’ll have to say is: why else would she have told me?

I go through the front entrance and into a lobby area, breaking off right and left in two hallways. I take the right. My heart’s pounding, but it, what I’m doing, feels right. The halls are lined with break rooms and offices, all with name plates next to the doors, but I wouldn’t know his name anyway. I decide on the third or fourth office I see and open the door.

Allan McDowell, Operations Manager

It’s a small room, with one big oak desk taking most of the corner, a whiteboard across one wall, two chairs, and a water container with paper cups next to the door. There’s a big guy in a nice collared shirt to go along with the desk. He looks up, eyeing me.

"Sorry to bother you," I start. "I’m looking for who would be in charge of the night-shift. I need to talk with him about a position open here. Keith Smith, from St. Joe."

He nods. "Greg Roberts would be the man you’re looking for. Two offices down."

"Thank you very much, sir."

I can feel the way my palms are sweating at my sides. Three workers pass me on my way down. I can’t help but notice how they stare at me.

I stop outside his door. I can’t believe how easy it is.

Greg Roberts, Shift Supervisor

I touch the pistol through my shirt once. Open the door.

This office isn’t much bigger. It’s got the same desk, more chairs, a bookcase, and it’s empty. I’m disappointed, relieved, all at the same time. I think about going to the other man’s office and asking where I can find him. But I decide to wait for him to come in behind his door.

Where’s he at now?

With Helen Summers somewhere in the factory at the moment? Somewhere else close to the main room where all of the machines are so nobody can hear her screaming?

I take the gun out of my pants, maybe just to hold it and know I’m in control.

I hear the steady thud of shoes coming down the hall long after. They’ve got to be men’s shoes, by the sound. I tense up when I hear them, and wait.

They pass.

More feet later. It’s a constant parade out there, and these pass, too. There’s no telling how long I’ll be here, where’s he’s at, if the man before had it all wrong, if he’s off tonight, in some downtown bar seeing who out of the women he’ll try to take home. I’ll wait as long as I’ve got to, I decide. For her.

This is our moment.

Another group of people are coming down the hall about ten minutes later, men’s voices rising over the sound of feet, and I’m so lost in thought that I barely realize (or maybe I wasn’t able to notice) somebody’s stopped on the other side of the door.

The man comes into the room and turns around to shut the door behind him, and he sees me and stops dead, his eyes widening a little, like they’re trying to take in everything they can to convince him of what he’s seeing. I raise the pistol and press the eyes of it against his forehead, coming forward as he backs up, eventually back to the wall. He’s a big guy, not tall, with a blue dress shirt on that’s coming untucked at his khaki pants and unbuttoned a few places to show tufts of his greying chest hair. He’s clean shaven. I notice the sound of his chest heaving for air just before the office door opens. I turn around, still holding the gun to him, and see the other man standing there—light hair, sun-wrinkled face. He follows his first instinct and backs out and shuts the door and runs off down the hall, shouting something.

Got to be quick now.

I turn back; he’s still looking at me. For one second he tries to move away from me, and the gun burrows deeper into his forehead. Greg Roberts’ eyes dart like a terrified animal’s—to the door, me, door, me.

"I know what you’ve been doing to her."

"Please—"

"Haven’t you?"

"Please, I—"

"Haven’t you?" The gun presses harder, making a darker dimple in his forehead.

"What? Please, there, everything’s in—"

"Haven’t you been raping her? Say it! Admit it!"

I can see it in his eyes. He may be scared as hell but he knows damned well.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about!"

I play the common card: "I want to hear you say it . . . Say it and I’ll let you go."

"Okay, yes." His chest rises and falls faster. He nods his head in agreement.

"This—"

"Everything’s in my desk drawer, money, all of that, please—""This is for Helen."

 

 

I fire once as he starts to move away. The gunshot is deafening off the walls of the little room.

His eyes settle forward on my face. He draws in one breath that whoops through his chest and stops there, leaking out a little at a time into nothing.

Twice.

He collapses down the side of the wall.

A red streak marks his trail.

 

As I turn around to leave the door swings inward. Standing there are five policemen. Somebody I passed earlier must of had to call them. It doesn’t matter, and before I know it, I’m in their grip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now it all comes down to me writing this, a chewed pencil in my hand and a notepad on my lap.

I was tried and sentenced for life to the Jefferson City Correctional Center on August 21, 1997, with a chance of parole.

I don’t see much of the group anymore. They wouldn’t come to a place like this. I haven’t talked to Helen since the day I went over to her place. I guess when she saw the morning news the next day she heard everything I had to say.

I do usually have one visitor every Thursday.

Almost three weeks to the day I was in here I heard the news from him: Ron was being tried as an adult for federal prison for the killing of his mother’s boyfriend.

David Harnell was charged with assault a week ago.

All of this comes from him.

I can’t help but think about it when I hear another name I know over the little portable radio on the yard outside. That’s where I write, where they can watch me and make sure I’m not going to try to do myself in with this damn pencil.

He’s the reason we hear those names. He let the beast out for them the first time.

He destroyed them.

I can’t help but wonder something else:

did he mean to do it?

No, surely not . . .

But then I see myself leaving our second meeting, the night Ron had gave Jim his side of his story, and John, clapping the kid on the shoulders.

"Well done."

I lay awake and think a lot more these days.

I wonder where the kid’s at. What’s he doing?

Where’s Michael Weeks?

What did David do this time around?

What about the next?

My visitor comes every Thursday when he can, like I said. We talk about the good times and what he thinks of all this. He talks more than I respond. He talks about getting me out of here, too. John slips the notes through a crack on the edge of the glass to me. Two weeks. All you have to do is wait, it says.

As for me, I haven’t had my fill yet. Like the others.

I think it’s time to start a new project.

I’ll take one out of the four hand guns Fingers stole and has kept from the guards for almost fifteen years, when he comes for me. I can have my pick.

And then from there the only thing I know is I’m going to get away from here. See how far I get.

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

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