Kem Nunn - Chance

From the looks of the place it had all been sitting like this for a good long while, with new brush, wildflowers, and the green shoots of trees spreading to hide a good deal of the charred and sorry wood. A small community of the homeless, of both sexes, had moved in. Some appeared to be occupying the old house while others had pitched makeshift tents among the trees. There was an old-fashioned carriage house off to one side of the big house and someone had painted WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF SPACE AND TIME across one of the doors and ABANDON ALL HOPE, MOTHERFUCKER across another. A number of the men were dressed not unlike D in old military gear of one type or another and Chance was willing to take them for veterans of the fight, in flight from or perhaps part time denizens of the large VA hospital in Palo Alto, and knew it for one of the haunts described in the medical reports he’d read at the hospital.

Darius Pringle, Chance noted, his military service or lack thereof notwithstanding, was treated by the other members of the camp with great deference as they were shown somewhat ceremoniously to an old couch and recliner chair arranged about a battered coffee table someone had salvaged from what might well have been the city dump and placed far enough back among the trees to have been invisible from the street. A large canvas tarp in colored patterns of camouflage greens and browns had been strung overhead to form a makeshift roof and the setting was, as near as Chance could tell, based on the reaction of others, a meeting place of some distinction.

D dropped himself into the recliner. Chance and Carl took the couch. “Talk to me,” D said.

Chance did.

“That’s a crazy-ass story, Doc,” D said when Chance had finished. “That’s fucked up.” He looked to the old man as if for confirmation and the old man looked back and Chance sat there looking at the two of them. It occurred to him that the sun had moved to a place more directly overhead, thanks no doubt, at least in part, to the planet’s rotation upon its axis. “Well what isn’t crazy?” he asked finally. He was possessed of the sudden urge to mount a defense. In truth, he felt at the verge of some hysteria, the light coming down preternaturally bright through a tear in the canvas and burning his neck, burning right through him is what it felt like, as if he weren’t actually there or about not to be. “How is it not crazy that there’s something instead of nothing,” he railed, “or that one day the mud stood up and began to walk or that the three of us are even sitting here right now? How fucked up is all of that?”

He had after all been days with very little in the way of food or sleep. His ass was on fire. It was not inconceivable that he was developing an infection, which would also account for his almost constant need to excuse himself for the purpose of making water amid the brush. Still he persevered. He was on to the odds of things now, of anything at all really, save some featureless void, and might even in time have worked his way round to Banach-Tarski and his particular take on their troublesome paradox had not someone at D’s direction given him a slightly odorous plastic bottle filled with water from which to drink. That he accepted without further regard for the bottle’s point of origin or even a good look at its contents, yet one more indicator of his precarious mental state.

“That’s a goddamn interesting way of looking at things, Doc,” D said as Chance paused to drink. The bottle smelled even worse at close quarters.

“Fascinating,” Carl added.

Chance mopped at his brow. “It’s just that when you say a thing is crazy…” He was feeling the need for a second defense in defense of the first defense. “The thing I want to say is… what isn’t crazy? What is not against the odds? And who really thinks that we are rational beings? It’s all such a goddamn joke.”

“We get all of that,” D assured him.

“The whore and the cop,” the old man added. “My God… it’s the stuff of song.”

“I’m good and lost,” Chance admitted. He might also have added that it felt as if a burning coal had found residence at a point just north of his perineum.

“Slow down,” the big man told him. “Let’s take a step back, see what this thing looks like piece by piece.”

“Amen to that,” Carl said.

She really had wanted help. Blackstone really had beaten her. And there he was… charging into Blackstone’s deal with the universe. Forty-eight hours and there’s an incident involving Chance’s daughter. Ambiguous. Shit lands on Chance’s computer. Not so ambiguous. Blackstone’s come to play and he can’t believe this won’t work. “You’re a fucking doctor for Christ’s sake,” D said. “Big brain, tiny balls. Are we good so far?”

“Pretty much,” Chance told him. Piece by piece, the man had said.

“What he doesn’t know about is me, and all of a sudden there’s shit landing on him . He’s on his back in the fucking hospital and he’s thinking this is fucked up. I would just say welcome to my world, asshole, but that’s another story. So he’s trying to recover and he gets wind of her splitting with some guy in front of the massage parlor and it sounds a lot like you and this is starting to get serious. She’s his frozen lake. He went way out on the ice to get her. If anything ever goes wrong she can hang him good. He could hang her too of course, but that’s not what he wants and he’s always figured as long as he can keep the plates spinning… But now you’re fucking with that and he’s tried scaring you. There’s really only one thing left. But you want to be smart about that sort of thing. Fuck it up and it’ll blow back all over you. Look at all this goat fuck in the Middle East.” This last drawing murmurs of approval from a small gallery of camp denizens who’d come for the sermon.

“But why make it look like an accident?” Chance asked. He saw no reason to drag the Middle East into it and the audience was making him nervous. “If Blackstone is behind all of this with Nicole… if he’s got these guys that troll for girls like she says… if one of them has gotten to my daughter… Why put her in the ICU then break her out?”

D nodded. “I used to collect money,” he said. “I had two rules. The person I was going to collect from had to have the money and they had to know they were trying to get away with something. That’s very important, those two things. Okay. So now you’re me and you’re going to collect. You never just walk up to the guy and say so-and-so wants his money and if you don’t pay I’m gonna break your legs. Threat’s never that direct. In fact, what I liked to do was to be very nice. That freaks people out a little because I’d catch ’em someplace where we could be alone and they wouldn’t know who I was. I’m this stranger and they see what I look like and they’re a little spooked but there I am being nice to them and they can’t quite figure it, at which point I say something like, why don’t you give so-and-so a call. He’d really like to talk to you. And all of a sudden they know exactly what this is about, what kind of guy I am, and why I’m there and nine times in ten that would be all it took. They’d really like to keep being my pal. I would leave the alternative to their imaginations. But there’s always some asshole thinks he’s tough and maybe he is. What you do with a guy like that… you don’t bother talking, you just grab him in a parking lot some night and you break his legs, break his hands too while you’re at it. You break both a guy’s hands he can’t wipe his own ass. It’s very humiliating. Then you wait till he’s recovered, as much as he ever will, and that’s when you go see him and it’s the same deal. You get him someplace where you’re alone and you just start bullshitting with him. Now if you did it right that night in the parking lot or wherever it was, and it was dark and you came at him fast and hard, it’s going to be very difficult for him to remember much. It’s a fucking blur. All he really knows is he got the living shit beat out of him. So there you are… and it’s good if it’s someplace like where he got mugged. He’s still trying to recover from what happened, meals through a straw, some nurse wiping his ass, and at some point he starts getting nervous. He doesn’t know you from Adam and yet there you are bullshitting with him about some completely banal thing with no sign of stopping anytime soon. He’d like to bolt but you’re making it so he can’t, but you can see he’d like to and that’s when you say to him, maybe you ought to call so-and-so. And all of a sudden he knows. He knows what happened and he knows why. And most importantly, he knows you’re the one. He knows what you’re capable of and he knows that if he doesn’t come through it’s going to happen all over again and he picks up the phone and he makes the call and you’ve never said a direct word about it.