T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

Achilles nodded, noticing that someone had slipped a pillow under his head and covered him with a blanket. His legs were stiff, his head thumping. He was momentarily confused. Feeling as if he was going to cry, he immediately sat up, hoping that would forestall any tears. “Nothing hurts, but if you want.”

“I want.” Bethany gave him a big smile. Her face was cherubic, the ever-red cheeks setting off the bright green eyes. She led him by the hand to the bathroom and sat him on the toilet. When she leaned forward to get a closer look at his cuts, her hair fell into her face and her breasts swung forward in her shirt.

She tucked her loose hair under her cap and went to work. Her fingers were cool and dry, her hands steady. When had anyone last touched him like this? He remembered the sixty-day shots and how he’d always hoped to get a woman, any woman, as the nurse. Bethany smelled like baby powder, her breath like almonds. His arms went limp as she bandaged his hands. When she reached for his ear, he felt her body heat as her heavy breast grazed his shoulder and pressed against his neck. Achilles would have taken a beating every day to come home to this.

Wages loitered in the hall, muttering. The bathroom was too small for all three of them. It was a tiny room with a shower instead of a tub and a medicine cabinet the size of a shoebox, a room so small, in fact, that Bethany stood with one foot in the hall.

“Be useful and get me some more alcohol,” said Bethany, glaring at her husband. “And a cup of water.” Wages left with a grunt. Bethany caught Achilles’s eyes with her own. “You know he doesn’t believe you. I asked him how he could let this happen to a friend. So he’s grumpy.”

“It was just a misunderstanding,” said Achilles.

“Even I don’t believe that. But, thank you,” she said. “He’s trying to stay up all night and party like a rock star and still go to work. He wants to live like he’s twenty-one again. I know you boys like to stay up late and all, and that’s okay. But whatever this is,” she motioned at his face and the bandages, “I appreciate your keeping him out of it. He’s not alone anymore, and he’s quick to react.” She leaned in, now close enough that her breath tickled his earlobe, “You know his temper, so thank you.”

Achilles nodded, though he disagreed. Wages always had one chambered, but that wasn’t a temper.

“First your father, and now this. Poor Achilles. You have it so hard.” She clamped her hand over her mouth. “I forgot I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”

“It’s okay,” said Achilles. Coming from her it sounded nice, not like pity.

Wages returned with the water.

Bethany looked through her red nursing bag and pulled out two brown glass bottles. “One to help you sleep, and one for the pain you’re going to feel in the morning, and you’re going to feel pain.” She gave him two pills and the water. After he swallowed, she said, “Lift your tongue and say ahh.”

Achilles obeyed.

“Shit, Beth, he’s not a chemo kid,” said Wages.

Bethany shot Wages a look.

“Sorry,” said Wages, throwing his hands up like she’d drawn a gun on him.

Bethany patted Achilles’s arm. Her hand lingered as she said, “Forgive me. I get into the work zone.” She stood. “That should do it. Get some rest, on the couch, on the couch.” She repeated herself until Achilles nodded in agreement. “We’re right in the next room if you need anything.”

“Yeah, like you have a nightmare, or the Boogie Man comes, or some shit,” said Wages. “You have more bandages than the Invisible Man.”

He did. Half of his skull was swathed in gauze, as well as most of both hands, and his entire right arm was one cottony limb. Wincing at the pain in his ankle as he stood, he gimped his way back to his pallet on the floor, and was just about settled in when Bethany called out, “Are you on the couch?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Just checking.” Her voice hung in the air like perfume. His skin was icy-hot everywhere she had touched him. He drifted off to sleep imagining himself in the photos. Achilles and Bethany at Disneyland, the steeple of the Enchanted Castle rising high above them in the background. Achilles and Bethany at Niagara Falls, sipping hot chocolate dotted with marshmallows, while Rex, their lazy yellow Labrador, rests at their feet. Achilles and Bethany on a riverboat, the paddle pushing them to their destiny, roiling water behind, while ahead, a river as smooth as glass. Achilles and Bethany at the Elvis Chapel in Vegas. Janice objects, but it’s too late because Janice already had a baby. Bethany was having his, and Janice shouldn’t begrudge him that. She was pregnant for Dale for chrissakes, a stuttering, tobacco-swallowing mechanic too lazy to chase down any deer he doesn’t drop on the first shot. But Janice is upset anyway, very, dark lines streaking down her face like she’s a melting candle. Her crying tilts into a choking sob. Achilles puts a finger to his lips. “You’ll wake Bethany. Shhh.”

IT WAS A MONTH BEFORE THANKSGIVING, TWO WEEKS AFTER HE’D ARRIVED in New Orleans, one week after the night at the camelback. He wouldn’t involve his friend, no matter how often Wages asked about the fight. Achilles had finally admitted he was ambushed in the boardinghouse, though he couldn’t remember its location. Nonetheless, Wages had put the word out. A few days before, Wexler and Merriweather had both called Achilles and left messages about “bringing the thunder.” That’s the kind of friends they were. They would have all insisted on being there, prosthetics and all, when Achilles went to Ready Pawn to take out a loan on his locket and buy an eight-round Mossberg with a clean black barrel and polished oak stock. They would have insisted on helping Achilles remove the dowel rod so that he could chamber four extra rounds. They would have helped Achilles pack the Mossberg in a big duffle on top of enough cardboard to lend the bag an innocuous shape, and cut a hole in the outside pocket so that he could fire it without opening the bag. They would have been in the car with him the night Achilles parked down the street from the green camelback and said aloud to himself, “No one is strutting out that back door. I’m going to show these motherfuckers what a real shotgun is.”

In the past few days, he’d slept often, eaten seldom, and thought much about this moment. Parked two blocks away from the green camelback, he visualized the inside of the house, and ran through the plan: He knocks on the back door. Blow opens it and finds his face mounted on the barrel like a silencer, aka the muzzle muffler. Lex answers his questions about Troy and returns his watch, or gets Blow’s head in his lap. In and out in less than five minutes and back at the quarry tomorrow night, though what he’d do there he didn’t know.

Immediately after the fight he’d been upset that he had tried to kill a man and felt nothing. As O’Ree once said, “There’s a difference between getting blood on your snout and developing a taste for it.” Having been shot at more than he shot, Achilles wondered if it was possible to develop a taste for something you’d never had. Every evening some Afghan assholes tossed a few potshots at camp, the bullets usually falling several yards short of the wall. The Americans shot back, and of course there were the two firefights, but he never knew if he actually hit anyone. You just shot until they stopped shooting back. It wasn’t like hunting, where you tracked the quarry down, bagged it, and ate it.

He rechecked the bag for the eleventh time, to ensure that the trigger was easily accessible. He would travel through the alleys to the back of the house, not that he was really worried about witnesses in this neighborhood. Even as Achilles sat there, a drunk teetered down the block, listing so severely he had to steady himself against the side of a truck. The bum’s face was pinched and worn, marked with fissures like Bud’s. Bud . Bud had better pray that Nawlins was a big enough city that he never ran into Achilles. He put his hands to the roof of the cab, near the smudge Bud had left, and said, “Hand to God. Hand to God, my ass.” He cringed at the memory of Father Levreau’s hands on his own. Why had he lacked the courage to shake him off, to shun the imposition of faith? Faith, as demanding and unyielding as the pain it was rumored to heal; faith, as costly as despair. Of all the prophets Levreau had mentioned, out of the entire Old Testament starting lineup, Achilles recalled only Jacob and Noah. Jacob he didn’t know, but everyone knew Noah: the man who built a boat in the middle of the desert and left his friends behind to be swallowed by the bitter surf.