Chris Lynch - Kill Switch

He really is a good guy. And it is to everybody’s benefit that he located the only job he could likely ever do.

“Anyway, again, thanks. You really helped us out here, and put yourself in a tough position. But we are going to have to get moving soon.”

“ Mi casa es su casa … until the students come back. Then the boiler room is mi casa and you have to get on out of here.”

I head out of the kitchen. “We’ll be gone well before that, I’m afraid.”

I walk down the hallway to Da’s room, just on the other side of the showers from mine. When I get there, the door is open, his bed is empty, and all his clothes are there on the floor.

“Jarrod!” I shout, echoing down every empty hall in the school and chasing all the birds into flight.

What is violence anyway, he asked.

A punch in the mouth? A cluster bomb? A needle in the eye?

What about just doing nothing when you should be doing something? Sometimes, can that be violence?

Let Gorgons be Gorgons, Da said. Sometimes hurt has to happen, he said, and that is not violence. Sometimes nobody lays a glove, and it’s barbaric.

Can you do what you need to do, whatever you need to do, at the moment you need to do it, Young Man? That is the important thing. That is the separator.

Could you do it, if you needed to? Whatever it might be?

“Where could he be, after all, Dan-o? It’s a small place, a safe place. Couldn’t hurt yourself if you tried, and I’ve tried lots.”

“A small place? Jarrod, there must be hundreds of acres here.”

“Really?”

It is a tall, tall order, with the grounds being so vast, so densely wooded for much of it. And I don’t even feel safe calling out his name, because I am paranoid that somebody who is the wrong somebody is going to hear us.

“Ollllldd duuuude!” Jarrod calls out.

I punch him hard on the arm.

“Shut up,” I tell him in an angry whisper, though even I think whispering is more than paranoid.

“Mwaaa, waa, waa,” I hear, garbled and possibly not even words to begin with, but certainly human. The sound seems to come from a long way off.

“There,” Jarrod says with some pride. “I found him for you. Calm down and let’s go celebrate.”

“What are you talking about? We’re going to get him.”

“All the way down there? On foot?”

“Grrr.”

“Come on, we’ll go get the tractor-mower. I have to cut the grass down on the playing fields this morning anyway.”

“You are so lazy,” I say. “Which way exactly? I am going down right now and you can meet me there.”

“Well, for me it’s up that paved road and then right on the next one, but as the crow flies, probably straight through these bits here. I’ll race ya.”

I am already cross-country running through the trees before I can answer his dumb challenge. I’m dumb enough myself, trying to call out to my grandfather as I run full tilt, but trying to whisper-yell so as not to be heard by anyone else.

He answers, though. Well, no, he doesn’t. He is there all right, probably a couple of hundred feet away at this point, and he is vocalizing, but it isn’t to me, and it isn’t in any English I recognize.

“Da,” I pant as I emerge into the clearing. If it were a football field, I’d be at my own goal line and he’d be at about the opposing thirty-yard line. I defy my unfit body and break into another sprint. He sees me.

And breaks away in the other direction.

“Da,” I call out again and again, but he barely looks back at me as he plunges into the far woods.

Eventually, I catch the old guy, and he is panting, but not as hard as I am. I turn him around and we breathe heavily into each other’s face. I am sweating a lot, but the cool forest air is peeling off the heat quickly.

It must be cooling him even quicker, because he is standing in his bare feet and pajamas. He has deep scratches on his hands and feet, bleeding like he’s been crawling through bramble hedges.

“What are you doing, Old Boy?” I ask, and I feel myself choke up just slightly as I ask it.

I step forward, to hug him, to warm us both, to stop him from answering.

And he punches me dead in the mouth.

I can hear Jarrod’s tractor-mower thing coming down the hill as I run after my grandfather once more. I can already feel my right eyetooth wiggling in its socket and a little bit of fat lip and blood.

“Jeez,” I say, catching him, wrapping him up, and, dammit, hugging him.

“Kill me, then,” he says. “It’s about time you caught me. You boys were always two steps behind. Kill me. Fair enough.”

“It’s not them, Da,” I say, holding him tight, breathing close enough into his ear to bite it off. “It’s me. It’s Daniel.”

He does not respond for a full minute. Then, “I was just going for cigarettes.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I say. “Nothing wrong with that.”

“It’s cold,” he says.

“Would you like a lift, sir?”

“I would, yes. I would like that. You are a good boy,” he says.

“Well, I try to be,” I say, releasing him from my grip and steering him back toward the field and to Jarrod. I hold on to his shoulders as if he is manually operated.

When we step back onto the smooth grass and Jarrod steps up to meet us, the old guy acts once more on impulse.

He punches unsuspecting Jarrod straight in the face.

Jarrod actually goes down. But he is laughing as he gets back to his feet. “Wow, that hurt a lot. Spankings from a granddad like you would put kids in the hospital.”

We hop on the mower once Da starts recognizing Jarrod’s distinctive manner.

“Did you ever kill anybody?” Jarrod says, steering the machine back up toward the dorms.

“Only once,” Da says, staring at the surroundings as if it were all just built and planted since he passed through earlier this morning.

“Tell it, man. Tell it, come on.”

Da hugs himself through the chill.

“No, I won’t,” he says. And the chill in his voice is so noticeable that even Jarrod recognizes not to ask again unless he wants to be number two.

“Did you take your medications this morning like you were supposed to?” I ask the shivering, shriveled Old Boy as he slips back into bed.

“I don’t take medications. Medications are for gimps, simps, and wimps.”

“Oh, another saying from your work?” I ask, snarky.

“I don’t have work. I am retired.”

“Where are your meds, Da?” I snap, tearing apart his modest allotment of underwear and toiletries packed nicely in his drawer like a new boarding-school schoolboy.

“I don’t have any,” he growls.

As he should, growl. Of course he doesn’t have his medication. I packed our stuff.

I blew it.

While Da sleeps and Jarrod mows, I pace. I sweat and fret and try and come up with a solution to this because we cannot go back home for the medicine because that will be the end of the road, and we cannot call the doctor to order more because that would give us away as well, and we sure as hell can’t go any further at all with no medication.

“My feelings exactly,” Jarrod says, walking in with grass clippings covering his legs.

“I guess I was thinking out loud,” I say.

“I guess you were thinking out loud, out there ,” he says, pointing out the window. “I could hear you outside. I could practically hear you while I still had my headphones on.”