Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule

So much for the Arroyos.

Those fucks are gone. Only part of it that sucks is that he never got a chance to beat the shit out of Timo. Or Ramon. Would have liked a crack at Ramon without that saw in his hand. Fucker’s big, doesn’t mean he can fight. Doesn’t mean he can take it. Paul can take shit those vatos never heard of.

He remembers all he’s taken.

Lightning crackles between his eyes, the first flash of a migraine.

He drags hard on his smoke, the cherry flares. He lifts the bottom of his T and touches the tip of the cigarette to his stomach, adding another mark to his collection. The migraine recedes, blown over the horizon.

And the pictures of what he’s endured go away.

He drops his shirt, the cotton stinging his stomach when it touches the fresh burn. He drags on his cigarette, tasting his own skin.

He can take it.

He can fucking take it.

He touches the wad of the Arroyos’ money in his pocket.

His money now. He boosts himself up on the bench and pulls the cash out. After the food and the smokes and the bottle of tequila they got a college guy to buy them at the QuickStop by the freeway, there’s a little over two hundred left. Fifty and change each.

Fifty bucks for weed and booze and pills and video games at the bowling alley. Fifty bucks to finish off the summer. Before senior year. Before he has to get serious about classes.

Serious enough to pass a few. Just enough to graduate. Just enough to get a diploma. Just enough to get that piece of paper so that there won’t be any question about the Army accepting him when he turns eighteen next June thirteenth and goes to enlist that same day. Next stop basic training. Next stop after that, the other side of the fucking world. Never to return, man. Never to return.

So fifty bucks worth of partying before that grind starts.

And the crank.

Sitting on the can this morning, door locked, bag of crank on his lap. Fingered a couple crystals out of the bag and set them on the edge of the sink and thought about crushing them with the bottom of his water glass and spooning up the powder on the end of his nail clipper and doing a couple whiffs. Enough in that bag to keep up for weeks. Keep up and clear. Keep him focused. Keep the shit that comes into his mind on the outside.

But if you could sell it.

And not like dealing it, George is right about that. Get into trying to deal it, say around the bowling alley with the loose joint dealers pedaling their bikes around and whispering, Loose joints, man, loose joints, one for two or three for five, loose joints, get into that scene and a bust is on its way. Cops always cruising the bowling alley. There’s the parking lot at the Doughnut Wheel. But those acid dealers from the other high school, they got that lot staked out. Besides, who knows how long it will take to sell it all?

Better to sell the whole bag at once. Won’t be worth as much, but still a lot. Enough for a car. But who the fuck has that kind of money? George and Andy’s aunt might be able to hook him up with someone. Or she might freak out. She doesn’t like crank. Stays away from dealing it herself.

Jeff.

Jeff doesn’t have the money himself, but he knows people. He talks all the time about stuff that fell off the back of a truck. Half the parts he gets for his Harley are hot. And he’s done some stuff himself. Talked about some of the places he’s guarded for Security Eye, goin’ in when he’s alone, boosting shit. He knows people who buy shit. And he knows dealers. Jeff knows everyone. And he won’t give a crap it’s crank.

Just got to handle it right. Got to be cool about it. Don’t just knock on his door with a bag of crystal and drop it on the table and ask what he can get for it. Start with the other stuff. Take him those chains and see how that goes. Maybe mention to him there’s some other things to talk about when the rest of the guys aren’t around. Yeah, be cool about it.

And then, the look on the guys’ faces when he rolls up in a couple weeks in a car? Sweet. They’ll have to work out some kind of deal. Park it at Jeff’s or Amy’s. Take turns with it. Hector can take it into the city to those punk gigs instead of having to go on the bus and BART. George can take his chicks for a ride instead of having to rely on them to borrow their dads’ cars. Andy, well, Andy can learn to drive in a badass set of wheels.

Sat on the can in his old grass stained soccer shorts and the George Blanda jersey he sleeps in, staring at that bag. And he did the right thing, dribbled those crystals right back inside. Then got a roll of athletic tape from beneath the sink, taped the bag closed, lifted the lid from the back of the toilet, and taped the bag to its underside before replacing it.

Dad’ll find anything you leave in the room. Checking it every day. Using that key he left in his jeans that time. Sure, let the old man dig around in there, that way he doesn’t dig around anywhere else. Don’t have to be as smart as Andy to figure out that kind of shit.

Course, the cherry on top of the morning was the newspaper. Saw the story about the Arroyos on the front page of the paper. Almost choked trying to keep from laughing and blowing milk and Cheerios out his nostrils.

Kyle Cheney jiggles the handle on the toilet, but the plug still doesn’t drop. The chain is snagged again. He lifts the lid off the back of the tank and sets it on the seat. Sure enough, snagged chain. He reaches in and untwists the tangled links and flips the plug down over the drain and the tank starts to fill with water. He fiddles with the handle, pressing it down and releasing it, trying to see why the chain only snags when he flushes.

Paul says it’s because he’s doing it wrong.

Flushing the toilet the wrong way.

He wipes his fingers on a hand towel and picks up his cup from the sink. Almost all brandy now. He drains it.

When did that happen? When did he become the kind of man who flushes toilets the wrong way?

It wasn’t always that way.

He’d been far and away the smartest boy in class. Not a prodigy maybe, not like Andy Whelan, but valedictorian nonetheless. He’d gone to college when that really meant something in this town. Not just college, but Berkeley. And a scholarship. Partial, yes, but a scholarship. And perhaps at Berkeley he was no longer the smartest, but he worked plenty hard. So, not top of his class, but good enough to be accepted for postgrad work in computer science.

And computers! That had been thinking ahead. He’d been dead right about that. It was one thing to say computers were the future, it was quite another to have the strength of your convictions and commit yourself to that path.

If he’d just finished.

If he’d just not let himself get distracted by Paul’s mother and her campus politics and idealistic crusades. And then, pregnant. Of all clichés.

With the PhD he’d still be there, teaching at UC Berkeley in one of the most prestigious departments in the country. Tenured. Perhaps a chair by now.

Well, he has a chair. At the satellite campus of a community college. An institution that specializes in GED prep courses and AA degrees.

Department chair.

Lord, he’s the entire computer department himself. Teaching data entry and machine language to borderline high school graduates.

Should have been more focused when he got the IBM job. Be a project manager by now. But Paul was born by then. And he’d fallen so in love with the boy.

His son.

Taken sick days just to spend more time with him. Margaret had loved that at first. Didn’t give a damn about his career. So many of the other men at IBM, complaining about their wives and how all they could do was shop and rag on them about getting ahead. But not Margaret. As long as there was food on the table and a roof over Paul’s head she didn’t care about money at all. He could hang about the house playing with his son all he liked. She was moved by what an attentive father he’d turned out to be.