Road Trip

by Dan Taylor

  Then he says, “Now go over there, asparagus dick, and do what you’ve got to do.”

  “There’s really no need to be hostile. We totally believed that officer about what went down before he shot Michael Brown. You wouldn’t believe it to look at us, but we’re actually pro-government, pro-autocratic-policing conservatives who couldn’t care less about racial profiling—”

  “Just get over there.”

  “Okay, I’m going.”

  We walk over to the bush.

  Officer Jockstrap says, “I’m going to uncuff you now.”

  “Good job you said now. Had you not, I’ve would’ve assumed you meant in ten minute’s time.”

  “Shut your mouth, shit bag.”

  “So I’m the shit bag, now, as well as the rapist? You should probably assign different grades of perpetrator with different grades of vulgar terms of address. You could call a hit-and-run suspect, for example, something less harsh, like cootie breath.”

  “You make any sudden movements, I’ll shoot you.”

  “I really need to go. Is it okay if I make sudden movements to unzip my fly?”

  He doesn’t say anything, so I assume that’s a no. He uncuffs me, and I make slow, exaggerated movements to get my penis out, like a frat boy rapist who doesn’t want to wake his victim by being a little too enthusiastic.

  You probably already know this, but I don’t really need to pee badly. Not really. I’m good for at least a few hours.

  But I feign like I’m trying. After ten or so seconds of this, I say, “Is your pistol pointing at my back?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Thought so. I’m not going to be able to piss under these conditions.”

  “I’m not holstering my pistol.”

  “I wouldn’t expect that. But could you at least point it somewhere else?”

  “Okay. Now it’s not pointing at your back.”

  I look at his shadow, which is made by the streetlamp two feet east of the car and is projected at an angle just to my right. As I thought, he doesn’t move or aim his gun somewhere else, but he does glance behind him, at Grace. But I don’t call him on it, the not aiming his gun elsewhere. I just feign trying to pee again, holding my breath in spurts and occasionally glancing up at the sky. I even do a little jig.

  “I don’t suppose you’re still pointing it at me, are you? I can’t see it, but my back and bladder, they know,” I say.

  “Fine. There you go.”

  He does aim it somewhere else this time, and based on the movement of his shadow, I’d say he’s moved it down a little, pointing it at my ass.

  “If you don’t piss in the next thirty seconds, you don’t get to piss.”

  “I’m good to go now. I can feel it coming.”

  As I concentrate on pissing, I think of water cascading down Niagara Falls, of whitewater rafting, and of a watermelon smashing into a thousand pieces when dropped onto asphalt. That last thought does it, and the warm flow begins.

  Time to put my plan into action.

  A couple seconds into pissing, I say, “Jesus! There’s a mosquito on my cock!” and then start screaming. I start flailing wildly, getting urine on myself. “What the hell do I do? It’s stealing my penis blood!”

  At this point, I turn around and aim pee right onto Officer Jockstrap’s shoes.

  While I formulated this plan, I figured there was a twenty-percent chance of him experiencing a knee-jerk reaction to shoot me, a ten-percent chance he’d remain cool and keep the gun trained on me as he looked mildly pissed that his shoes are now covered in urine, and a seventy-percent chance he’d forget he was holding a pistol, unconsciously aim it away from me, look down at his shoes, and say something like, “The fuck? Are you pissing on me?” which just so happens to be the exact wording he uses.

  I mentioned earlier that it would be better if Grace was somehow involved in the plan, but that I wouldn’t be able to communicate it to her. I insinuated that it would be ideal if I could somehow give her a sign when to get involved. While I didn’t mean to, I realize now, as Grace is running towards Officer Jockstrap, that I inadvertently brought her into the plan when it sounded like I was double-bluffing Officer Jockstrap when suggesting it would be best to keep Grace in the locked car. I also realize that, from Grace’s perspective, it might have looked like I was giving her an opportunity to tackle Officer Jockstrap while I was stalling pissing, which was my way of making the officer lower his weapon.

  My plan was to drive my knee into Jockstrap’s face when he looked down at his shoes. But just before I can land the blow, he hears Grace creep up behind him, turns around.

  And shoots.

  19.

  Grace falls to the ground, seemingly in slow motion. I stand there, frozen, no longer peeing. And Jockstrap—Oh, jeez, what have you done?—standing motionless.

  I forget for a second that I have my penis hanging out of my pants and run around Officer Jockstrap and towards Grace. I get on my knees beside her. She has her eyes closed and is groaning as she curls into a fetus position. I search for her wound, checking vital places—her head, her face, her chest, but don’t find a bullet wound. And then I see the blood starting to flow, from a wound that could either be in her hip or her stomach. I close my eyes a second, hoping it’s the former.

  And then I lose my shit, turn around to look at Officer Jockstrap and say, “What the hell have you done?”

  By his white pallor, this situation hasn’t yet sunk in for Officer Jockstrap. He doesn’t respond, just stands there, frozen like a Popsicle. Then he starts to say, “I don’t. I don’t. I don’t,” over and over again.

  I turn back around to Grace and pull up her blouse. I don’t see the wound in her lower abdomen, so I pull her pants down a little, see a nasty-looking wound under her panties, the hip area, oozing blood.

  Panicking, I say, “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Put pressure on or some shit?”

  I slick my hair back with a shaky hand in an unconscious gesture, take a deep breath, and then think about what I need to start doing to save my wife’s life.

  Talking to myself, I say, “That’s what I’m supposed to do. Put pressure on the wound.”

  I do, making Grace shout out in pain, and then I turn around to Jockstrap, and shout, “Get over here. We need to carry her to your car.” And then, forgetting Officer Jockstrap isn’t a real cop but some lunatic who had bad intentions for us, I say, “You need to call it in, get an ambulance on the way.”

  Still stuttering, still shocked, Officer Jockstrap says, “I—I shot her.”

  “I know that.”

  “Jesus. I didn’t mean to shoot her.”

  “Just get over here.”

  He hesitates a second, and then holsters his gun. He then runs over. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You get her arms, I’ll get her legs, and we can carry her over to your car.” I raise my voice for some reason. “Honey, everything’s going to be okay.”

  He kneels down and hooks his hands under her armpits and I hook my hands underneath her knees.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  He nods, and we lift.

  We make it a couple feet before my pants and my briefs start falling down, but that’s the last thing on my mind. I have to waddle the last three feet bare ass because my pants and underwear bunch up around my ankles, like that freaky kid at junior high who dropped his draws all the way to take a leak in the urinal.

  Had I not been carrying my gunshot-wounded wife to the back of a fake cop’s car, I would look ridiculous.

  When there, Officer Jockstrap asks, “What now?”

  “We put her in the back of the car is what now.”

  “How—how we supposed to do that?”

  “You back into the rear passenger seats and you lay her down.”

  “In the footwell?”

  “What the fuck’s the footwell?”

  “The space in front of the seat for the feet.”

  “On the seats. Where else.�
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  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “Just get going.”

  He does what I said, making a meal of it, falling a few times in the process as he tries to back his way into and eventually through the rear passenger section of his car. We lay her down on the seats and Officer Jockstrap runs around to the driver’s side, gets in.

  I get in the side that Grace’s head is on, lift her head up, lay it on my lap, and tell her again everything’s going to be okay.

  But I get a bad feeling.

  And not just because Grace is bleeding a lot.

  I don’t like how Officer Jockstrap hasn’t started driving yet.

  “What the fuck are you waiting for? Let’s get going to the nearest hospital,” I say.

  Officer Jockstrap doesn’t say anything, just sits there in silence. He runs his fingers through his brush-like flat top a couple times, and then he does something that I regard as being more than a little alarming.

  He takes something out of his pocket, a small folded piece of brown paper, and then empties some of its content out onto to the back of his hand and insufflates it. A couple years ago I had a small cocaine habit, nothing serious, below average by Hollywood standards, so I’m hip enough to recognize a fellow degenerate when I see one. Either this is what the guy is doing, taking cocaine, or he didn’t read the instructions on his box of Xanax properly.

  “Dude, what are you doing?”

  He breathes in deeply, and then says, “I’ve got my shit together now.”

  “Good, I think.”

  And then he repeats what he said, over and over, almost to himself.

  Grace groans loudly, and her whole body tenses up and she starts panicking, saying she doesn’t want to die and that she’s shit scared of it.

  This motivates me to demand that Officer Jockstrap start the fucking car and stop partying like it’s nineteen-eighty-nine.

  He takes another deep breath, unholsters his pistol, turns to me, points it in my face, and says, “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jeff. Not just yet.”

  20.

  Before this happened, based on his behavior after he shot Grace, a couple of theories ran through my mind about what Officer Jockstrap’s deal is. Since he all but shat himself the moment he realized he’d shot someone, I figured Officer Jockstrap for a local delinquent, and this is how he gets his kicks, dressing up as a police officer and driving around, arresting people for fun. My nephew does the same shit, only with an imaginary car and gun and a uniform that my sister bought for him from Party City.

  Looking at it now, that theory has a few holes. The first one being how he would know that we’d committed a hit and run today. The second being that Marlboro Man seemed to be some kind of plant. And the third one, and this is a biggie, he just referred to me as Jeff, refused to go anywhere, let alone to a hospital, and he just cocked the hammer of his pistol.

  He continues, “Julie’s just going to have to wait.”

  Jeff and Julie?

  I’ve heard those names before.

  Before I can get to thinking when I heard them, he says, “That wound, I don’t think it’s that bad. Not life-threatening, I mean.”

  I shake my head. And ask, “Why?”

  He takes off his shades, revealing tired, red-rimmed eyes. “Why what?”

  “I meant, what is this?”

  “It’s going wrong, is what this is.”

  “I don’t understand, my name’s not Jeff, and why does ‘Julie’ have to wait?”

  And then I remember. The hitchhiker. When he asked us what we were called, for some reason I didn’t want that psycho knowing our names. They’re the ones I told him, Jeff and Julie.

  “Listen good,” he begins. “I don’t want this night ending knowing I shot and killed someone. And that’s not the way all this will end, at least not the killing part. But if you don’t do what I say, well, I’ll—”

  “Shoot you. Me, I mean. I get it.”

  He smiles, the same smile when he was just some cop helping us out of a sticky situation with a rapist slash murderer.

  “Good, Jeff.”

  21.

  “You a good actor, Jeff?” he asks. “That why you moved to Hollywood?”

  “I was a pretty convincing clown at my nephew’s birthday party.”

  He nods. “And how old was he?”

  “Five, I think. Six. Maybe seven.”

  “Well tonight’s crowd is going to be a little tougher to convince, and you’re not going to be pulling a rabbit out of a hat.”

  “I’m pretty sure magicians do that, and can we get to the point? My wife’s dying here.”

  “She isn’t. She’s got a flesh wound. Barring my having shot a major artery, she’s got hours.”

  “Are you a doctor? Is that why you moved to some shit-stain town?”

  “Okay, I asked for that. And no, I’m not. But I’m the guy with the gun pointed in your face.”

  “At. At my face,” acting a little catty.

  “At, in, it makes no difference. And are you listening good, Jeff? Would you define it that way, I mean, running your mouth like a burned hooker?”

  “I am as good as I can be with my wife… I suppose you don’t need reminding about what you’ve done. You were the one who shot her.”

  “And you’re showing amazing restraint. I’m impressed.”

  “Guns make me pragmatic. My mom always said that about me.”

  “Now you’re starting to think a little straighter, Jeff, apart from the odd bit of sass.”

  “Can we just drop the Jeff shit?”

  “And what, you tell me your real name?”

  I think a second. “Jeff’s fine, now that I think about it. Before you tell me what the fuck you want me to do, do you want to make up a name for yourself? It’s really good fun.”

  “Even though I’m a deputy, you can call me Officer Field. The same name on my badge. And I’ll tell you what the fuck I want ya’ll to do, plural.”

  22.

  Those of you who know me know I hate it when people say ya’ll. I get it. The English language doesn’t have a plural for you, and Officer Field or Jockstrap or whatever wanted to clarify that it’s both Grace and I who needs to do something. I’m just saying I would’ve preferred ‘you both,’ ‘you guys,’ or ‘ihr,’ the German plural for you.

  Okay, that last one was a long shot.

  I’d explain this to Officer Field, but I feel like I should probably say this first: “Have you OD’d on coke? I don’t know if you noticed, but all Grace is good for is lying as she sweats profusely, and moaning my name over and over again. Is that coincidentally what you want her to do?”

  Before Officer Field can reply, Grace sits up quickly, catching me in the chin with the top of her head, and starts freaking out: her legs kicking, her breathing rapid, and screaming bloody thunder.

  As I try to calm her down, he says, “She’s coming around.”

  “She’s in shock.”

  “At least she’s moving.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind…?”

  I calm Grace down, by telling her everything’s going to be okay and that the officer just wants us to do a little something before we can take her to the hospital to get her all fixed up.

  As well as being in shock, she must be delirious, as she says, “Knock him out, silly dummy. Punch him in the face.”

  “You know I can’t punch for shit, honey. You knew that before you married me.”

  “Sit her up. She needs to hear this too.”

  “Honey, would you mind?”

  Without waiting for her to reply, I lift her up into an upright position. She’s clenching her eyes shut and making a constant humming sound.

  He looks at me. “Is she listening?”

  To check, I say, “Honey, how many fingers am I holding up?” and hold three fingers in front of her face.

  “That requires seeing as well as listening.”

  In between hums, Grace says, “Three.”

 
; I turn to Officer Field, and nod. “She’s listening.”

  He sighs. Then says, “Here’s the deal. We’re going to see the sheriff, and you guys can’t—”

  “That’s better.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Carry on.”

  “You guys can’t let on I shot you.”

  “Got it. You got it, honey?”

  She says three again.

  Officer Field sighs and rubs one of his hands through his hair. “This shit is important. Like deadly important.”

  “What do you want me to do? She’s got a bullet in her waist or upper thigh or whatever. She’s a little distracted.”

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  Officer Field rummages around in his pocket, pulls out his package of coke.

  “Woah! Hold on there! You’re not giving her that shit,” I say.

  “What? Is she straight edged?”

  “No, she likes to party, but do you think that’s wise, in her condition?”

  “Pregnant?”

  “Hell no. The bullet.”

  “Relax, first thing they’ll do when you arrive at hospital is pump her full of this shit, but she has to be able to listen and pay attention to get there.”

  “Morphine. They’ll pump her full of morphine, not that stepped-on cake effervescence you have there.”

  “Have you got any better ideas?”

  “Just let me try again, will you?”

  I shake Grace by the shoulders and ask her if she’s listening to the shit we’re both supposed to hear. The only response I get is, “Ten fingers. All ten fingers. The fuck, J—?”

  “Okay, pass it over,” I say, interrupting her before she could say my real name. He passes it over, and I look at it and sigh. Then I say, “Honey, I’m going to give you some medicine. I’m going to put a dab of it on my finger, and I need you to breathe it in, through your nose.”

  She doesn’t respond, but I open the package anyway, get a little amount on my finger. “Does that look good?” I ask.

  “Start with that,” Officer Field says.

  I hold it up to her nose, but she doesn’t play ball, so I close her mouth and wait. Nothing happens; she just breathes through her nose, barely getting any of it in there. So I close the nostril I’m not holding the coke under. She breathes regularly for a couple seconds, and then takes a long, panicked breath through her open nostril.