Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule

Big Bob Whelan, saying it like it is. Again. Telling him that everything has a cost. There’s no free rides and life’s not fair and there’s always assholes wherever you go. Work, work, work and get by and take a break on weekends and crack a beer and watch a game and show your kids how to mow a lawn and drywall a house and shovel rocks and play hard and there’s no such thing as second place winner and be nice to your wife and she’ll be nice to you and don’t take anything for granted and clean your plate and as long as you live under my roof you live under my rules and there’s no such thing as a free ride and if it ain’t easy that just means you should work a little harder, doesn’t it?

The lesson of life: You get what you work for, if that.

George turns from the mirror and goes to the bathroom at the foot of the stairs. He gets in the shower and blasts it cold to stop the sweat. He should have brought his jeans down with him, his jeans and the Aerosmith Toys in the Attic T he plans on wearing today. Getting dressed up there, he’ll just start to sweat again. He thinks about the money from yesterday, wonders if there’s enough to buy an air conditioner for his room, a window unit. No. His dad would want to know where he got that much cash. But a fan, he could probably get away with a fan.

He thinks about the money, but that makes him think about the Arroyos’ house, and that makes him think about hitting the street and the El Camino just missing him and what it might have felt like to go under the wheels.

He could have died. But according to dad, that’s not the worst thing that happens to you. The worst thing is that you work for someone else and have to put up with assholes telling you what to do, that’s the worst thing.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Be smart enough, and maybe it doesn’t have to be like that. If he can get to be good at something else, he won’t have to work. Not really.

Andy makes a map.

He starts with a blank piece of graph paper. Sitting at his little desk, wearing the glasses he hates, tracing heavy black lines over the light blue lines on the paper, creating a world.

Not a whole world, just a part of it. A tiny secret corner filled with puzzles and traps and treasures and monsters. A dungeon for heroes to explore and plunder.

With one hand he draws. With the other he fingers a set of geodesic dice, tossing them one at a time or in combination, glancing at the numbers and applying them to secret formulas only he knows. The results dictating which way a tunnel will twist, where a crevasse will open suddenly, a goblin leap from a recess, a potion of healing be found.

He could design it all. Lay it out in his head and put it on the paper, but randomness is cool. It injects chaos into the game. Chaos is cool. He wouldn’t have thought of that on his own, but reading about it lately, it’s cool. The way order is just an illusion, something we create in our heads and lay over the world to try and force it to fit all these ideas we have about the way things should be. But the world’s not really the way people think it is. Or maybe it is. Hard to really say for sure. But chaos seems to make more sense than anything else.

It explains a lot.

Like how you can be so smart about some things and so dumb about others.

Like stealing the methamphetamine and giving it to Paul.

Now that was stupid.

He stops drawing for a second and bangs his forehead against the desktop. Really, really stupid. Man, why is he so damn stupid?

Imsuchadildo.

He lays his head on the desk, still fiddling with the dice, letting part of his brain play with the numbers. Letting the smart part of his brain play.

Stealing the crank is either the coolest thing he’s ever done or the lamest, he’s not sure which. Order or chaos.

Paul’s into it. But there was never any question that he’d be into it. Paul likes all the ups. He likes getting baked and drunk and dropping a lude, but he really likes the beauties and the whites and the greens. Any kind of speed. Like Paul needs to be more high strung. Like they need Paul to be more high strung and starting any more trouble than he already does. Half the hooks they end up in are because Paul is so uptight and can’t keep it together.

Some jocks walk past laughing, probably talking about the time one of them farted in remedial English, and Paul thinks they’re laughing about him and starts calling them fags and telling them to say whatever they have to say to his face. They take one look at the four of them; big Paul with the curly hair and acne scars on his cheeks, Hector with his mohawk and safety pins, skinny George with his pretty face that all the girls dig, and Andy, short and scrawny with the long unwashed hair; and it’s on.

Fag this and fag that and kick your fucking ass and do it if you’re gonna do it stop talking about it and fucking do it, fag, until one of them explodes from the pressure.

Chaos.

Fists and kicking and going down on the pavement with someone’s arm around your neck and your hair getting pulled as your brother tears that guy off you and seeing someone’s legs in front of you and grabbing their ankles and pulling them and hoping the fucker doesn’t split his head open when he hits the ground and Paul always going after the biggest one and getting him down and sitting on his chest and punching his face over and over until someone drags him off.

A dozen fistfights play out in Andy’s head. He throws a grenade into the middle of them all and watches the body parts fly and winces and bangs his head again and rolls the dice and only stops rolling when the sum of their faces divided by the number of dice he’s rolled totals a prime.

Order.

Yeah, Paul thinks the crank is cool. And if he does like he was talking about and sells it and gets enough money for a car they can all cruise around in, then stealing the bag will be cool. If he ends up whiffing it all himself and getting higher strung than he already is, then it’s just the lamest idea ever.

And he can’t even tell George what he did.

George’ll be pissed.

Just have to wait and see what Paul does. He’ll either tell the guys he has it and make like he was the one who took it and tell them it’s too late to do anything about it now and start figuring a way to sell it. Or he’ll keep his mouth shut. And if he keeps his mouth shut, it’s because he’s snorting it.

He lifts his head, rolls the dice, puts a trap in an empty room. Then changes his mind and replaces it with treasure.

Paul rides his bike into George and Andy’s garage. The cars are gone. Their mom and dad already at work. He leans the bike against the toolbench and lights one of the Marlboros from the pack he bought yesterday with the Arroyos’ money.

It’s so cool George and Andy don’t have to worry about their folks being around during the day. Not like his dad. He’s always around. Teaches computer classes at the community college down the 580. Staggered schedule. Night classes, day classes, morning classes. Summer, winter, fall, spring. Sooner or later, every fucking day, he pops up. Asking questions, nosing in his business like it’s not enough already. Like he hasn’t gotten enough and wants more, more than he’s already had.

He grinds his smoke out, tossing the butt in the coffee can full of sand that Mr. Whelan keeps out here, lighting another.

He smokes. And finds something else to think about, taking out of his back pocket the tightly folded copy of the Valley Times that he snatched off someone’s lawn on the way here, and unfolding it on the workbench.