Charlie Huston - The Shotgun Rule

Paul leans his bike on the 240Z and Jeff waves his cigarette.

– Hey, whoa, no, not on the wheels.

Paul moves the bike, leans it against the porch.

– Sorry, Jeff.

Jeff puts the smoke back in his face.

– ’S no problem. What up with you guys?

Paul stands at the foot of the steps leading to the porch, the guys are still straddling their bikes, looking at rocks, trees, weeds. He pulls out a Marlboro.

– Kinda wanted to talk.

– Yeah?

– Yeah.

Jeff goes back to work on the carburetor, dipping a rag into an old baby food jar full of gasoline and using it to clean a residue of black carbon from inside the carburetor.

– What about?

– Some shit.

Jeff cleans. The guys stand around.

Paul takes a step up.

– Jeff?

– I’m still here.

– Yeah. Could we maybe talk about it inside?

Jeff rubs his wrist against his chin, takes the smoke from his mouth and tosses it in the dry weeds.

– Look, guys, I got to be at work in a couple hours and I want to get this thing back together so I can ride. Sick of the damn bus. Something’s up, get to it.

Still straddling his bike, Andy waddles forward and steps on the smoldering butt before it can ignite the oil soaked weeds around the cars.

He looks at Jeff.

– We stole some stuff and we want to know if you can hock it for us.

Jeff gets up, wipes his hands on the ass of his jeans, opens the front door and points inside.

– Everybody out of the fucking water.

By sitting on the kitchen counter and leaning his face against the far end of the window over the sink, Mr. Cheney can see all the way down the street to the front of the Whelan house.

He’s watching when Hector rides up, that disturbing wedge of hair jutting up from his head. He’d been such a sweet quiet boy when his family moved into the neighborhood. The first Mexican family on the block. Well, the only one actually.

He reaches for the brandy and tips more into his coffee cup, no longer bothering to mark the label or put the bottle back in the cupboard after each drink. It’s nearly empty now, so why bother? A quick run to the Liquor Barn and he’ll have a full one. Or maybe not, a drive into Pleasanton seems rather far. The Safeway is closer. Except that Cindy Whelan will be working there. Well, a few groceries to surround the bottle then, just to keep her minding her own business.

Oh nonsense!

Dave’s Liquors is right next door to the Safeway, if he’s going to drive to the shopping center he can just go to Dave’s. To hell if anyone sees him going in there twice in one week. Three times? Hell with it anyway. And he can get a pint at Dave’s, something for the glove box as well as the bottle for the house.

He empties the last of the brandy and leans his forehead against the window as the boys tumble out of the garage, laughing.

They’re high. Christ, they’re stoned out of their minds. He saw enough of it. From Paul’s mom. Woman could barely get up in the morning without smoking a joint.

His son is reeling around the driveway, mouth open, too far away for his father to hear the sound of his laughter.

Mr. Cheney remembers when he could make his son laugh like that. The boy was so ticklish. Under his arms. Tickle him under his arms and he would kick and scream, tears running. Not any more. Now he has to get stoned to have a laugh.

Damn that woman.

If only she had left sooner. If she had taken her drugs and her rock and roll and her Disarm Now posters and gotten the hell out of here sooner. Maybe it’s not kind to say, but if only she had died sooner, maybe then his son wouldn’t be the mess he is today.

But that will be changing soon. Paul may ignore him, ignore his attempts to communicate and to return their relationship to what it once was, but he will have to listen when confronted with the contents of that bag.

He’s not a stupid man, after all. Top of his class. He knows amphetamine when he sees it. And he knows enough about his son’s history with the Arroyos to see that the bag is somehow connected to their arrests. Paul will have to listen to him in the face of that knowledge.

Not that he wants to threaten the boy. Not that he’ll handle it that way. A conversation is all it will take. A conversation explaining that he doesn’t want to see his son getting into trouble that he can’t get out of.

And what’s he asking for anyway? Nothing. Just to be included. Just for them to spend time together. Just for his son to be available to him.

He brings the cup to his lips, but it’s empty again.

He looks at his watch. His first class begins in two hours. A quick trip to Dave’s and then out to the campus will take half an hour. That gives him another ninety minutes to watch his son. Mr. Marinovic stops his car in front of the boys and says something. He watches as the old man drives off and Paul and George run across the street and out of his view. And he’s still there, face pressed to the glass, five minutes later when they run back into the Whelans’ garage followed by Hector and Andy.

By the time they’re on their bikes and riding down the street hurling insults at one another, he’s called the school and told them he’s too sick to come in today and is crouched low in the driver’s seat of his car.

He drives around the block, going the opposite direction from the boys, and rounds the corner in time to see them taking their bikes across the field where the old elementary school used to be. He ignores the stop sign at the end of the block and turns onto Murrieta in front of a speeding station wagon with fake wood paneling on the side, forcing the other car to hit its brakes, the driver leaning on his horn.

As he takes a left on Portola, the boys have broken from the field and are skidding from the sidewalk into the QuickStop lot and on under the sign for the trailer park. He parks in the Orchard Hardware lot across the street and waits.

Baking in the sun that pounds through the windshield, looking at the liquor display in the QuickStop window.

Jeff takes another sip of lukewarm beer, looking at the pile of jewelry on his counter, teasing one of the chains loose from the tangle.

– See, what you have here is mostly shit. The silver, the fourteen carat gold stuff, it’s crap. The twenty four carat chains and these ones here, these two are platinum, these are worth something. The diamonds and the pearls, I don’t know. Could be something, could be crap. Problem is, pawnshops are full of this shit. They buy it because it has intrinsic value and it takes up no space. Way better than a TV or some stereo or some shit like that, but still they got tons of it and it’s a buyers’ market so you get, maybe, I don’t know, ten percent of value. If you’re lucky. So, you know that, you’ve hocked shit before. But, also, most places, you walk in with a handful of gold and silver chains and they don’t want to fuck with them. A couple at a time, even from kids like you, that’s whatever, no big deal, but a handful of hot jewelry, that’s a no no. Whatever you guys have heard, seen on Baretta or Hill Street Blues, whatever, pawnshops aren’t all fences. Not professionals anyway. And the ones that are, go in with something like this, all in a pile like this, next time the owner gets in trouble with the cops you’re gonna be one of the guys he snitches.

Sitting on the filthy carpet, his back against the wood paneling, just underneath an Easy Rider calendar, Andy blinks when he hears the word snitch.

Paul is perched on the fold down kitchen table, having cleared space in the mess of magazines, used paper plates and assorted scraps of the cars out front.