Ryan Thomas - The Summer I Died

My savior, the cavalry, trying to save the corpse of the bad guy.

“Sir? Sir?” he kept goading the cadaver. Then he looked at me and asked, “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”

I don’t know why I responded, but I nodded my head. Maybe I was trying to sin as little as possible at that point, not make it any worse than it was. Maybe I was proud.

“Do you have any weapons on you?” he asked me.

I pointed to the ax sticking out of Skinny Man’s head.

“Are you hurt?”

I nodded.

“Okay, I want you to lie down on the ground. I’m going to come over and put these cuffs on you-”

I lost it. I slammed my fist against my head, punched myself in the chest, swearing that if he came near me I would kill him. I would never wear handcuffs again.

“Okay, okay,” he said, in some lame effort to calm me down, “but you gotta lay down for me, you gotta give me that. Otherwise I can’t check and see if he’s alive. Can you do that for me?”

Before I knew it, I was sprawling out on the ground on my stomach. My chin plopped into the puddle of blood running out of Skinny Man’s body.

“Now don’t move. Do you hear me, don’t move. I’ll still shoot you if I have to.”

He came back, full of trepidation, and went to place his hand on Skinny Man’s neck but stopped before he touched him. Then he mumbled something soft, put a hand over his mouth and backed away, disgusted.

“Is anyone in the house?”

I nodded.

“Are they hurt? Did you hurt them? Are they dead?”

I kept nodding, though I was only answering his first question. Once I remembered Jamie was downstairs I just wanted him to go in and save her.

“Don’t move, you hear me, I will shoot you dead on the spot if you so much as lift a finger.”

He walked up the grass to the front door, his gun at the ready, his head swiveling side to side in case anything surprising came at him. When he reached the door, he glanced back at me and saw me still on the ground. Satisfied, he grabbed the doorknob and opened the door.

Butch exploded out like a cannonball and caught Officer Teddy by the throat. His gun went flying into the bushes beside the door as the dog hauled him to the grass and tried desperately to rip open his neck.

I thought, no, this can’t be happening. Butch is dead, I stabbed him. Why is this still happening?

For a long time after, I wouldn’t remember what happened that day. I spent several years not thinking of anything much. No matter how many treatment wards I stayed in, or how many psychiatrists tried to open me up, I pretty much shut that day up in the back of my mind and threw away the key. I spent a long time in California, without ever going there. My dad, strong as he was to take care of me and my mother for the next several years, even went so far as to buy me a surfboard and put it in my hospital room in the hopes I would answer the doctor’s questions. Still, no matter what anyone did to unlock the door I had sealed in my mind, I more or less refused to remember it.

But one thing about that day I never forgot, through all of my self-induced fugue, was what I had seen in the hallway upstairs when I had rushed Skinny Man.

I had seen Tooth.

Now I know I was tired, and losing my mind, but there was something odd about that vision, something that told me I wasn’t just seeing things. I’m not sure when I worked it out exactly, but eventually it hit me, and it kept me carrying on through life.

He wasn’t wearing his Red Sox hat.

I know that might sound stupid, but whenever I had thought of Tooth up to that point, it was the Tooth I had always known, the Tooth never to be caught dead without his Red Sox hat. And it wasn’t like he was just standing in the hallway with us-he was down on all fours. When Skinny Man fell backwards, I could have sworn he had done so over Tooth’s body. I had seen Tooth again in the living room, telling me to kick Skinny Man in his leg wound, and it had freed me. Again, he wasn’t wearing his hat.

And as Butch hauled officer Teddy to the grass with the knife still sticking out of his furry, red shoulder, I could have sworn I felt hot breath in my ear as Tooth’s voice whispered, “Roger, I told you, always check the chamber first.”

I lay motionless for what seemed like an eternity, though it was probably a very short blink-of-an-eye second, until I understood what I had just heard. I rolled over in time to see a shimmering blur that kind of resembled Tooth, and yet kind of resembled heat wave. But it was gone so quickly I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t imagined it.

For some reason I reached for the hat in my back pocket and it was gone, which didn’t mean a whole lot since I’d been rolling about with Skinny Man. Probably it was on the stairs inside or on the living room floor. It didn’t matter anyway. What mattered was I had never checked the chamber of the gun.

I flung myself toward the 9mm resting against the curb and picked it up just as Butch tore the radio handset off Officer Teddy’s shoulder. The man was screaming, bleeding profusely, probably pissing himself. I had seen it all before, and I hated that dog for continuing it. When I slid back the chamber of the gun, a small bronze bullet stared back at me.

“Tooth.” I looked for the heat wave again. It was gone.

Quickly realizing his mistake, Butch dropped the radio on the ground, freeing the cop from his bite. Not wasting any time, the cop began crawling to me. When he saw me pointing the gun his way he opened his mouth in disbelief, threw his hands in front of his face. He thought I was going to shoot him. Butch, seeing his meal scuttling down the lawn, gave chase, saliva whipping out behind him like a kite tail. I had one bullet, and I wanted it to count. I remembered shooting beer cans with this gun, how it shot slightly to the left, how if you could compensate correctly the shot was pretty accurate.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the second police car come screeching to a halt, the door flying open, a cop shouting, “No!” Butch was running at Officer Teddy, eyes mad and hungry. Officer Teddy was screaming.

There were two gunshots.

The first went in between Butch’s eyes and exploded bits of brain out the back of his head, throwing his body into a gyrating heap of black fur that crashed full on into Officer Teddy. The second went whizzing under my chin and took a nick out of my throat. Searing hot pain spread across my Adam’s apple, and I fell backward and dropped the gun.

With a sudden rush of realization, Officer Teddy pushed Butch’s heap of dying flesh off of him and ran over to me. “Whoa! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

“Get out of the way, Teddy!” screamed the other officer.

“No, put the gun down! It wasn’t him, it was the dog! He shot the dog. Look, he shot the dog. It was attacking me.”

“You’re bleeding! Get out of the way!”

“The dog! He shot the dog! Put the fucking gun away!”

The second officer lowered his weapon and looked at the dead dog on the grass. Utter confusion spread across his face, and he looked back at Officer Teddy a couple of times and tried to speak but couldn’t think of what to say. He walked over to us as Officer Teddy put a hand on my throat and asked, “Where did the bullet go?”

I pointed to my neck, to the scratch the bullet made. He sat back on his ass and wiped his brow. The dog bite in his shoulder looked like roast beef. “Thanks,” he said. “Don’t know if you deserve it yet, a thanks that is, but I got a feeling there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”

Cop number two was standing over Skinny Man’s corpse, waving flies away. “Teddy,” he said, nice and calm like he was trying to rationalize what he was seeing, “what the hell happened here?”