Complicated Shadows

by James D F Hannah

  "I'll do my best."

  I got out of the car and Simms drove off. I took a sip of coffee. It had gone cold. I dumped it out on the ground, threw the cup into a trash can, and drove home.

  24

  Woody and I walked out of St. Anthony's after the meeting that night. He had a cigarette lit before we cleared the door.

  "How'd he look?" he said.

  "The way he looked at the motel the other night," I said, bumming a cigarette. "I think he looked worse because once I knew, my brain filled in those expectations you have when someone tells you they're dying. As soon as he said it, it was like he was weaker, more fragile."

  "Simms isn't one likely to pull back from a fight."

  He wasn't, but the words still sounded empty. Simms was a brawler, but he was also a guy who had wanted nothing more than his wife back, and sometimes when we get what we want, we don't always know what to do next. Like the dog chasing a car, with no clue of what happens if we catch it.

  Woody said, "You hungry? Want to get food?"

  I wasn't in a mood to go home and listen to Izzy snore, or to be by myself, either. The meeting had been more useful than usual if only because it offered up a vague reassurance about life. No matter what, we were all drunks, hapless about what it took to make the world work, fumbling through and hoping for the best.

  Woody mentioned a beer joint outside of town, not too far from Witcher Shoals Mines #4, off the same road to my house. Miners rolled in there after shifts to get burgers. I'd tried them one day for lunch, and the cheeseburgers were great, because beer joint cheeseburgers almost always were. The cook in back pounded out the patties by hand and cooked them on a grill that violated health codes and common sense. The buns were buttered and toasted and there was enough mayo to clog your arteries on the spot, along with a slice or two of melted cheese. It was a thing that made America great.

  Woody and I had been there before, even though it was a beer joint. I didn't have drinking memories from there, though, and neither did Woody, so we didn't feel too bad about going. We went for the burgers, and on nights when it looked like the Riverside might be too crowded following the St. Anthony meeting.

  I said I'd follow him over there. I trailed behind Woody's Chevy in my Aztek. I needed to find a new ride, since the transmission was slipping. I poured transmission fluid in on the regular and kept my fingers crossed and hoped for the best, which still sucked hind-tit most of the time.

  I had all of that on my mind, combined with Bob Seger singing "Hollywood Nights" on the radio, and I guess that’s why I wasn't paying attention when the car T-boned Woody.

  We were on Rt. 82, about two miles outside of town, when the headlights came on from nowhere, shining like a predator's eyes in the dark, on an exit road off of the main drag. There wasn't much in the way of prelude, just lights and tires spinning and then the car surging forward and slamming into the front passenger side of Woody's truck.

  I jammed my brakes in time to watch the car push Woody into the other lane of traffic. That time of night, the road was empty and quiet, and I suddenly became aware of the solitude and the sense of being alone.

  The car was an Oldsmobile, 80s edition, an all-steel Toronado with 300-some square inches of engine. The engine roared and the tires squealed as the car pushed Woody's truck into a ditch. I pulled the Aztek over and pulled a snub-nosed revolver from the glove compartment.

  Men came out of the Toronado. Two of them walked toward Woody's truck, and one of them came in my direction while the driver stayed in the car. Bulky guys, wearing ski masks. I doubted they planned to check if we were okay, or to let us use their Triple-A.

  The chunk of road was dark except for moonlight. I aimed at the shadow moving toward me and pulled the trigger. He didn’t seem to notice or care he was being shot at. My reputation as a marksman must have preceded me. My hand trembled like an epileptic fit as I fired the weapon and shot after shot whizzed by him.

  At less than 10 feet away, I him center-chest, and he stood there for a moment, as if shocked it had happened, before he dropped to his knees and fell over, face first.

  I ran toward Woody's truck. Muzzle flashes lit up the truck cab, and then I heard grunting and blows being struck. I picked up a head of steam, moving faster, when the guy I'd shot reached out his arm and tripped me. The revolver flew from my hand, and I hit the pavement. When my bad knee pounded against the blacktop, the first waves of pain and nausea pulsed through me, and it took a moment for me to get my focus back.

  The guy I'd shot stood over top of me, grabbed my shoulder, rolled me over, and punched me in the face. He drove an elbow into my gut, and stomach acid surged, and it took everything I had to not vomit. My body involuntarily clenched up, and he punched me again.

  "Where is Isaac McCoy?" the man said. He said it with a thick accent. Asian. I wasn't sure if it was Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, or what. It wasn't an accent you got from being in West Virginia.

  "What?" I said.

  The answer pissed him off, so he clocked me another one in the face. I felt my jaw shift and my teeth grind against one another, and the skin around my left eye tore open. Warm blood oozed out of the cut and down into my ear.

  He used the front of my shirt to lift me up off the ground and dropped me back, my head bouncing against the pavement. "Isaac McCoy! Where is he?"

  I shook my head, which hurt like hell. "I don't know!"

  He slapped me. It hurt less than the punching, if only by percentage points.

  "You lie!" he said. "Where is he?"

  The other guys stayed busy working Woody over. Someone asked him the same question about Isaac McCoy. Woody asked him if he used chopsticks to jerk off with.

  I made a mental note for the next time he gave me shit about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Presuming we had a "next time."

  My guy slapped me again, to make sure he kept my attention, I suppose. He looked over toward where his comrades were smacking Woody around.

  "You and your friend, we kill. You want to die? Homo Isaac McCoy, you die for him?"

  "I've never met Isaac McCoy."

  "You look for him, though. You and this asshole and the dead homo."

  The man hocked up a loogie and spit, missing my face by about an inch, though I still caught a misting across my cheek. "You tell where McCoy is."

  I could have told them about Isaac McCoy being in the motel in Serenity, though no way in hell was he still there. They might have stopped beating Woody and me. I guessed if they did, it would be just long enough to kill us. No idea. No matter what, helping these jokers wouldn't be good for Isaac's continued well-being.

  The guy growled and pushed himself to his feet. The bullets had blown open his shirt, and I could see his body armor underneath.

  The other guys dragged Woody by his ankles from out of the ditch and onto the pavement, about twenty feet away. His eyes were swollen shut, and he smiled at me with teeth covered in blood.

  The guy who had worked me over fired off a machine gun-fire of noises I thought were words. The other two said stuff in return.

  I coughed up blood and spit it out.

  "Hey, Woody!" I said.

  Woody groaned.

  "How you doing' over there?" I said.

  "Never better." His voice sounded thin and weak. "You?"

  "Top of the world, ma."

  Woody laughed, the laugh turning into a coughing spasm. He groaned again, louder.

  "This wouldn't be happening if you'd taught me Krav Maga," I said.

  "I'll listen better next time."

  Shadows came over me. I saw all three men staring down at me. I smiled. It hurt like a motherfucker.

  "Hello, ladies," I said.

  Wrong thing to say, I suppose.

  All three kicked at me, driving the steel toes of their boots into whatever body part they could connect with. I tried to squirm away, but my body refused to listen to my brain, and the movements I could make hurt too much. They continued kicking me
and laughing. A barrage of boots began in my guts, moving up to my ribs, to my face my face. A rib cracked. I sucked in air and screamed from the pain. And then I stopped seeing or hearing anything, and I became grateful for the reprieve.

  25

  Jackie Hall said, "We're looking for the same model vehicles in the area, but I wouldn't put out much hope we'll find anything out. We're guessing they stole it and abandoned it once they finished beating your ass."

  I was dressing in the hospital room where I'd been for the past three days. I moved at a pace that would have shamed an arthritic turtle in a body cast. Everything hurt, and if it didn't hurt, it didn't work anymore. A nurse had informed me I had three cracked ribs, and I should consider myself lucky I hadn't punctured a lung. It was all piled on top of the concussion and general issue smacking around, handed out by a handful of angry probable Asians. I needed to find a new definition for "lucky," and a punk band named "Angry Probable Asians."

  I looked like I'd lost in the fifth round of a fight with a Mack truck. My face was purple and puffy, and I resembled a pile of bandages and bruises that couldn't blink. They had knocked out a tooth from the back of my mouth, and the doctors seemed to think I swallowed it, so I had that to look forward to in a few days.

  "And another thing," Jackie said. He sat in a visitor chair, eating the second Big Mac he had pulled from a McDonald's bag. He had been generous enough to offer me one, but the thought of it made my stomach churn like the Edmund Fitzgerald, so I declined.

  "Yes, Columbo?" I said.

  "About the Asians."

  "The Asians? Like, every Asian person?"

  "No, only the ones you're saying beat you and Woody up."

  "What about them?"

  "Are you sure they were Asian?"

  "I suppose in the most technical of senses, no. It was dark, and they were wearing ski masks, so all I could see were their eyes."

  "Uh huh. And what shape were their eyes?"

  "Are you asking me a serious investigative question, Jackie?"

  "Approach this from my angle, Henry. Say someone tells you 'Hey, I got the shit kicked out of me by a trio of Asian guys.' You ask them, 'Where at?' They tell you 'On a rural stretch of road in the whitest place on Earth.' Hell, Henry, we don't even have a Chinese restaurant in Parker County, so you're saying Asians are coming here to fuck your shit up when they could make me General Tso's chicken?"

  "They sounded Asian, okay? I don't know for sure if they were Chinese or what, but I know they were talking something that wouldn't have qualified as English."

  I had pulled out the curtain divider that separated my area from the other bed in the room. The guy in that bed was a fossil already there when they wheeled me in. I didn't know what his problem was since he hadn't said shit in three days and instead kept his TV turned to Fox News and snarled every time someone mentioned Obama. He interspersed it all by regularly ripping out farts that would have discolored paint.

  I was putting on my jeans when Jackie said, "Dammit, man, I'm trying to eat over here. No one needs to see your nasty-ass boxers."

  "You brought me these clothes. If they're nasty, it's because you got McDonald's on them, and I don't even want to think how some shit like that would have happened."

  "Doctors know when Woody will wake up?" Jackie said.

  "No idea. They threw out a lot of terms I would have needed a medical dictionary to have understood, but the gist of what I caught involved it being incredible for him to be alive, such as being alive is being hooked up to a bunch of monitors and having a tube shoved down your throat."

  What I'd pieced together in the aftermath of it all was that Woody and I had laid there on the side of the road for a while before a car passed by and someone saw us and called 911. It had been a local minister headed home from a church business meeting. The EMT told me later the preacher had stayed with us until they arrived and prayed while they loaded us into the ambulance.

  I had to stifle a scream as I pulled a T-shirt on over my head. My arms then didn't want to bend to fit into the sleeves of my other shirt.

  "Billy came by," I said as I buttoned the shirt.

  "He told me," Jackie said. "He had to let me into your place so I could get your boxers."

  "Didn't I give you my house key?"

  Jackie shook his head. He finished the Big Mac and wiped up secret sauce out of the box, licking it off of his finger.

  "When I came by, you were mumbling shit I couldn't even understand. He said you talking nonsense was normal."

  Billy hadn't stayed long. He’d never been a man run over with sentimentality, so he would have wanted to make sure his only child was alive so he'd know if he needed to buy an extra burial plot. Billy would always be a practical son-of-a-bitch that way.

  He had picked up my Aztek from the scene and taken it home, however, and had also taken Izzy over to his place. The old man and the dog liked one another enough, I should have been jealous and wondered about my standing in Billy's will.

  Jackie fished another Big Mac box out of his bag.

  "How many of those goddamn things are you going to eat?" I said.

  From the other side of the curtain, a cracked voice said, "Do you mind not blaspheming the Lord's name?" He followed that with a sound like cardboard being torn in two.

  The smell drifted our way, and I felt three days' worth of tapioca surge upward, and I worked to keep it down.

  Jackie waved his hand in front of his face a few times, then said, "I'm eating this one, and then I'm done."

  "Are there more in the bag after this one?"

  Jackie couldn't say much with a mouthful of Big Mac.

  "I know I'm leaving a bed empty here, but that doesn't mean you have to fill it up by having a coronary," I said.

  With a mouth full of half-chewed burger, Jackie said, "Screw you."

  There was another crack of thunder from the behind the curtain, and the stench that floated over was like rotten eggs soaked in cat piss.

  I finished dressing and said, "Can we get out of here before this old goat gasses us like it's a goddamn war crime."

  "Blasphemers!" the old man said, and farted again.

  The hospital hallway stunk of bleach and heartbreak, but it was better than the intestinal potpourri in my room. An orderly came by with a wheelchair and told me it was hospital policy he wheel me outside. I told him that wasn't necessary, and he said everyone told him that, but it was still his job.

  "Go ahead, old man," Jackie said. "I'll get the car and drive you back home."

  As the orderly pushed me down the hall, I peeked through the open doors and at the people inside. It was a creepy and voyeuristic exercise, the vicarious watching of pain. People slept in uncomfortable chairs, necks bent at an angle they'd pay for later. Others gathered around beds, joking and laughing with one another. Some watched TV, or played on their cell phones, while the person in the bed slept.

  And then there were the ones wearing their hurt openly, like war paint. Some cried, and others strained to keep it in and failed in the effort. Those were the people who would leave there alone, the last memories of a person tinted by the sounds and smells of a hospital.

  We passed by a room and I asked the orderly to stop. I pushed myself up and out of the chair, my muscles and bones screaming bloody murder, and inched my way inside.

  The only sound in the room was the steady beep of various devices. Heart monitor. IV drips. The hissing of a ventilator.

  Woody was the only patient in the room. His left eye so big it looked as if someone had shoved a golf ball underneath the eyelid. You'd have thought he was dead if it weren't for the slow, rhythmic rise and fall of his chest.

  I clinched the bed railing, bit on the inside of my cheek. Felt the rage boiling up inside of me.

  "I'm pissed as fuck at you," I said. The words came out harsh, a hair above a whisper. "Because of your stupid ass, I have to go out by myself and do shit I don't want to do. When you wake up, I will beat the fuck out of you."<
br />
  The orderly was talking to a nurse when I walked back out into the hallway and lowered myself into the wheelchair.

  "That's the guy, came in with you after the accident, ain't it?" he said.

  "Yeah, it is."

  "You guys like—" He paused, wanting to make sure he didn't say the wrong thing. "Partners or something?"

  "Friends. He's my friend."

  "You hungry?" Jackie said.

  "No," I said. "How in the hell can you be?"

  "I burn hot. I use a lot of fuel."

  "You're a human being, not a goddamn jet airliner. Flights to Tokyo use less fuel."

  Jackie was driving me home. Outside the Serenity town limits, into the unincorporated part of Parker County, there wasn't much: mom-and-pop convenience stores, meth labs, and concrete-block bars with beat-up cars sitting in gravel parking lots.

  Jackie followed me inside once we made it home. In the kitchen, I pulled a pack of hamburger from of the refrigerator, along with green onions, an egg, and Worcester sauce, and I took the George Foreman grill from a cabinet. While the George Foreman heated up, I chopped up the green onion and dumped them into a bowl with the hamburger, some Worcester, the egg, a dash of garlic salt and some bread crumbs and pepper, and smashed everything out into patties.

  "You going to cook 'em on that thing?" Jackie said, pointing to the George Foreman.

  "That's the idea."

  "It drains all the fat out of the burger."

  "That's also the idea."

  "The fat's the best part. Fat's what actually makes the burger good."

  "I appreciate you bringing me home, Jackie, and I'm grateful for you making at least a rudimentary effort to do some police work, but you don't come into a man's kitchen and tell him he's making burgers wrong. Go further south, and you'll get shot for shit like that."

  "I'm a hamburger snob. Not like I told you your gravy was too thin."

  "Less than an hour ago, I watched you wipe out three Big Macs like they were an indigenous people; you don't get to play the foodie card after that. You'll eat whatever sits still long enough and doesn't bite you back."