The Wrong Man

by Louis, Matthew

  He looked at me for a moment, thinking, and when he spoke, his casual mockery of everything in the world wasn’t present for once. “Just be aware, dude,” he said. “These are the gangsters you don’t fuck with around here. What I heard is, Owen was trying to kill your buddy, and it didn’t work out, but Rich has got it coming sooner or later. And you’re next on the list. All kinds of people saw you guys at that party, saw you leaving, and you got named. I’m just warning you, dude. You’re in it.”

  I nodded again. “Okay. Thanks, man. Seriously.” It seemed I couldn’t quite fill my lungs. You live like a maniac through your twenties, do so many idiotic things for so long, and nothing much ever happens. And here, now, I didn’t want to take any chances in my life, just wanted to get the fuck home and work my job and go to my classes, and the worst kind of trouble had latched itself onto me. It was like winning some lottery of shit luck.

  Sully had his jacket draped over his arm now and was fitting the earbuds of his iPod into the sides of his head. We didn’t close out the register between shifts and he simply stepped away from it as the door buzzer sounded and a customer came in. I had to step up to my post behind the register and as I did Sully said, “Adios, Sam,” and sauntered out.

  By the time I closed the cash drawer and thanked the customer, Sully’s VW was gliding away through the parking lot. I was alone, wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do now.

  I wouldn’t claim to understand gang politics in this town any more than a man outside a zoo cage can understand how hyenas choose their alliances and organize their hierarchy. All I know is the Mexicans who shoot and beat on each other and operate Blackmer’s drug trade aren’t anything like the East Coast gangsters you see on TV. The organized criminals in this town will never run bookkeeping operations or protection rackets or have the mayor or chief of police on their payroll. They have only one consistent trait that I’ve ever observed: massive, steel balls. Their only rule of conduct is Don’t go out like a pussy. They don’t give a second thought to trading blows on the sidewalk downtown with complete strangers who wear the wrong color or say the wrong word in passing. They keep pit bulls and behave like pit bulls, and, as with pit bulls, your best bet is to not move too suddenly, not raise your voice and not make eye contact.

  But, like I said, I’ve only ever been on the outside looking in.

  Blackmer, you see, is a community divided along racial lines, a mixture of two groups that don’t tend to mix—the remnants of the Okies who came to work the fields three generations ago, then moved up or at least moved on, and the Hispanics who have been working the fields ever since.

  Racism, in a town like this, just is. We’re animals, and when we’re penned with animals that have different colorings and markings, the males of the species are going to get nervous. You’re going to hear a chorus of growling, and we’re going to bare our teeth and raise our hackles and occasionally try to rip the throats out of the alien creatures.

  But then, maybe I’m dead wrong. Maybe a racial utopia is possible. After all, the hardest Mexican gangster I ever met had a ghost-white complexion and pale blue eyes.

  I had known Owen Ferguson, or known of him, for most of my life. It made sense he would insinuate himself in this because he knew both me and Rich and had never liked us. I could just see him in a murky, smoke-filled living room in some little back-alley house, vacuuming up a line off the communal mirror, then glancing around at his red-eyed associates and saying in that nasal voice of his, “Yeah, I know that guy, Sam Schuler. He’s a punk, aye. I’ll go hit ’im up an’ he’ll just fork over the money, man. Don’t even sweat it.”

  The joke we used to make was that Owen Ferguson was like Tarzan, raised among the apes and then gone on to lead them. When I entered Conejo Junior High I was surprised to discover this homely white boy was the toughest kid on campus. Most of us Caucasian youths had to tread lightly, to stake out our territory at the corner of the grounds and endure the sneers and scoffs and Spanish insults we couldn’t understand. But not Owen Ferguson. He was one of them. He lived in the middle of gangland, had a Mexican stepfather and a half-Mexican half-brother, and he had run wild in the dirtiest streets and alleyways of Blackmer his entire life, until his English was spoken like a second language and he sneered and scoffed at white people and thought of them as a separate species from himself.

  Even then, at twelve, Owen had been lanky and rangy, half a head taller than most of his friends. And he was already renowned as a fighter—always willing, eager, desperate to square off and start swinging with anyone, any time. He was a tyrant on the school grounds, holding court at a blue fiberglass picnic table, “talking shit” with a Mexican accent among the budding twelve-year-old Hispanic thugs whose big brothers and uncles and fathers were the veteran criminals and warriors of Blackmer. Even then, Owen was already a vato in his soul and a favorite of the vatos in his neighborhood despite his blue eyed, raw-boned, ridge runner ancestry.

  That he would come for me seemed inevitable. As Sully had pointed out, Owen “lived” just across the parking lot. He and his crew had made a sort of clubhouse of the bar off the side of Rancho Bonita, the Mexican restaurant that was just a two minute walk from where I now stood.

  I tried to imagine reasoning with him, explaining what had happened and seeing his eyes soften with comprehension, but I shook my head and cursed. He didn’t have the capacity. The arc of his evolution had been completed in junior high.

  I figured the worst was going to happen and tried to brace myself for it.

  3

  When I saw Owen entering the store about a half-hour before closing, my body stopped being mine. My legs went rubbery, the room seemed to tilt and swing around like a carnival ride, and I couldn’t do a thing except stand there and stare.

  Up to that point I had succeeded in putting it out of my mind. I had to write a report on a hundred-year-old novel called The Octopus for my class on local history and I was trying to force the story down in huge gulps, to take it like medicine—and was surprised to find myself enjoying it. The evil thing lingered just outside the spotlight of my thoughts, and every so often I would look up and think about Rich getting his head split open with a blackjack, but I had made up my mind not to fall to panic until I knew for certain that there was something to panic about. I was almost ready to sigh relief, at least for tonight, when the electric sensor on the door sounded and I marked my place with my forefinger, lifted my eyes, and felt my heart clench to a stop.

  Under the fluorescents Owen Ferguson’s crisp white T-shirt shimmered, his loose khaki pants were pressed and new. His hair was mowed tight to the scalp, darkening the top of a long, insect-looking head that was dented and scarred from his uncountable street fights. The overall effect of him was clean and utilitarian, but somehow disposable. Cheap. The only blemish on his appearance was the line of dark green cursive tattooed at a crooked angle on his neck, under his right ear.

  My mouth fell open and I said, “Hey . . .” Nothing else occurred to me. Owen’s face showed only that slack, somehow demented look of a person whose mind is steel-reinforced against fear. I wondered if he could jump out of a tenth story window and never change that dead-faced expression all the way down to earth. He had tight, thin lips, close-set eyes and a smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose.

  I couldn’t move as he drew close. I just blinked ahead, cleared my throat and tried to find words that might save me. I didn’t even flinch when he didn’t break stride and sprang forward and socked me under my left eye. I didn’t fall either. I guess my head just snapped over and then back like my neck was a spring.

  “What do you think, bitch?” he said.

  I blinked at him. I still had the paperback in my hand, closed on my finger as if I was going to go back to reading. My other hand, I realized, was now holding my face.

  “You think it’s over or what? You think you and your faggot friend can pull that shit and then you don’t gotta pay?” He sounded a little like Marlon B
rando. His voice seemed to be generated in his nasal passages and he had a painful-looking underbite that you didn’t notice until he spoke.

  “Look, man.” It was a strangled, distant version of my voice. “I didn’t—”

  His hand slapped the glass lottery ticket display that was built into the counter. “Shut the fuck up! You know what I’m talking about. You know me, right?” He pointed at his own chest. “You know what I’ll do, Homes. You heard about your buddy. I’m gonna be outside.” He seemed to think a moment. “Five hundred bucks,” he said, drilling me with his look. “And don’t give me no stories. You got it in there.” He jabbed a finger at the cash register.

  “Aw, no man, I can’t—”

  He froze me with another look, his bulldog jaw a challenge, his eyes like little blue pools of congealed gel, his whole head like a wax sculpture some kids had played football with. “Who the fuck you kidding, Homes?” he said. “You think I don’t know what happens in this fucking place? You’re a fucking thief already so don’t even try to blow smoke up my ass.”

  “I’ll lose my job!” I was fighting the whine that wanted to creep into my voice. “I didn’t take anybody’s fucking weed, man. I don’t know what you heard but it’s bullshit.”

  His eyebrows shot up his forehead. His pupils were small as pinpricks in the faded blue irises, but those tiny spots seemed to be pouring forth animosity. He couldn’t believe, evidently, that we were still having this conversation. “Try me,” he said. “Just try me, motherfucker. I want you to.” And he stepped backward and finally released me from his glare, turned around and glided away over the maroon utility mats. I watched him exit the bright store and stride into the nighttime parking lot toward his lowered, black-windowed Celica.

  I felt like I had entered a dream state. I found myself moving with the studied deliberateness of a drunk. My hand rattled as I marked my place in The Octopus with a register receipt and laid it on the shelf under the counter, beside the basket of matches. I stared down for a moment, concentrating on breathing, then forced myself to move. I went into the walk-in cooler to throw some beer onto the shelves and create the impression I had done some work tonight. There was no one in the store and while I was back there I half-hoped that Owen would come in, lean over the counter and hit NO SALE and grab all the cash he wanted. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I had to submit. It was a street-dominance ritual.

  Everyone who worked here stole from this place, and Owen knew it. Hell, half the town knew it. But nobody stole five hundred bucks in one shot, and I sure wasn’t going to risk my job, kill the goose that laid golden eggs, just to give it to this semi-literate fucking cretin for something I didn’t do.

  So where did that leave me?

  I could fight him, I guessed. I even thought I could win if I really wanted to. He was a couple of inches taller than me, but I had twenty pounds of muscle on him. I had wrestled in high school—senior year I was second place in the county in my weight division—and the three drunken fights I had been in since then were decided by my ability to maul and pin my opponent. I began to imagine myself “shooting the legs,” taking Owen to the ground, twisting him up and holding him paralyzed, but then I shook my head. I may win the battle but did I think the guy fought by any rules? Did I think he wasn’t armed? I was practically guaranteed a bullet through the neck or a switchblade buried in my kidney.

  No, what I knew I had to do was let him sock me a few times, knock me down, and then let him pull out my wallet and get the thirty bucks in there and call me “pussy” and “bitch.” And then maybe he’d let it go. There was a chance, anyway.

  I came out of the walk-in cooler and went to the breaker box and flipped the green-painted breaker switches, darkening the store. I had pulled the newspaper display in at nine. I crossed the shadowy room and locked the door, leaving the keys dangling in the slot. With the illumination inside the store gone I could see Owen’s car in the empty parking lot, a high lot-lamp shedding dull whiteness down on it, and I could hear the faint thump of rap music. He was parked right next to my Fairlane. This thing was going to happen. I went behind the counter, punched in the code so the register popped the cash drawer and started grinding out its report, and I started gathering the cash from the compartments. I tore off the three feet of register tape and took that and the cash into the back to count up and fill out the closing sheet. When I was done I bound it all up with a rubber band, put the package in the floor safe and spun the dial with a determined twist of my wrist, locking all the money away from myself and Owen.

  I stood straight and realized this was it. I took a deep breath. Fuck it. I’d do it. Face the music and all that. I stepped out of the back and I blinked and my mouth dropped open. I pulled a sharp breath and said, “What the fuck.” There was a black and white cop car nosed up behind Owen’s Toyota—and my Fairlane—in the otherwise empty parking lot. Owen was out, ass against the back corner of his car, and a big cop was passing a flashlight beam over the seats through the open driver’s door. Owen appeared bored. Then his head turned and he seemed to look right at me.

  I stood there. I waited a full minute while the cop harassed the thug, and then they had some parting words and Owen got in his car and the cop got in his. The cop seemed to wait for Owen to start the Celica, back out and begin crawling away, and then the black and white slid along behind him. The parking lot was empty except for my Fairlane—a white, used-up junkyard relic waiting off to the side, leaking its nightly puddle of 10-40 onto the asphalt.

  I didn’t know what to make of what had just happened except I was certain it wasn’t good. Cops interrupting anything short of a child-murder is never good, but there was something especially horrifying about this. I punched in the code with a trembling hand, activating the alarm, and got out of the store. No headlights appeared. Nobody bothered me as I walked to my car.

  The only other remarkable thing about this night was that as I slowed to turn into my apartment complex a pair of headlights swelled up close to the back of my car, as if the driver was trying to tell me something, and then their motor bellowed and the car bore hard to the left and careened away. I couldn’t see if it was Owen’s Toyota, but I assumed it wasn’t, because Owen would have kindly followed me in and worked me over in the dark parking lot. Just some tough local gorilla beating his chest. At least that’s what I told myself.

  4

  When I went into Vanguard the next day Sully was behind the counter. He had a knot of hangers-on around, a couple of white skaters with the backward caps, tattoos and eyebrow piercings and a tiny Americanized Mexican who must have been nearing forty, clinging to the group until he could score something for free. They had a football game on the TV that was mounted up in the corner, over the magazine rack, and you could bet the business was losing a hundred bucks in beer and cigarettes today.

  I walked in and said, “Hey,” and they all looked at me. A couple of the guys muttered greetings and Sully averted his eyes and echoed, “Hey.”

  I stuffed my jacket on a shelf under the counter and got an orange juice from one of the coolers. Sully eyed his friends. “Guys,” he said. “Go wait at my car. I’ll catch up.”

  They made a few cracks but did as he said, and when they were gone Sully looked hard at me. “You fucked up, dude.” His voice was low and grave. Secretive. His brown eyes hooked mine and held them fast. In the naked daylight his face looked like it had been boiled until the flesh was ready to drop off his skull.

  “What?” I felt the ice trickling down my spine, raising gooseflesh on the backs of my arms. I had a good, sickening idea what.

  “Calling the fucking cops.”

  “That shit last night? Hey man, I didn’t call the cops. They just showed up. Owen needs to know that. Can you tell him? Tell someone who knows him? Do me a favor and do that, can you?” My voice was strained. Terror was knocking hard.

  “Yeah,” Sully said. “I’ll call him, dude. But he’s pissed. He was in here saying all kinds of shit. I’
m just telling you. Next time I see that guy, if I was you? I would call the cops.”

  And that began the longest eight hours I had ever known. Like they say, the hardest part is the not knowing. How about not knowing if you’re gonna get shot or stabbed or blackjacked or what? How about terror shutting down your mind a hundred times in a night as you wait for some skinny murderous prick to come and rush you every time you hear the electronic buzzer in the doorway, every time you see a lowered car pull up thumping rap music? How about thinking every tough, wannabe pimp asshole—the guys who made up half of Vanguard’s clientele—was sent by Owen and his crowd, and he’s going to maybe rush you and drag you over the counter, or maybe just whip out a gun and start blasting away?

  That was my eight hours and in case I was going to forget my predicament, at seven-thirty Rich came in, still alive after all. He wasn’t so bad. He just looked like his head been dynamited to small pieces and then stuck back together by a six-year-old using Elmer’s glue. He displayed, with an odd pride, the gap where one of his big front teeth was gone and the other broken in half, under a purple lip that was completely split, four or five times its normal size and sewed back together with thick black thread. One eye was puffed shut, his nose ballooned and squishy-looking, and his cheeks and forehead dark and lumpy.

  “What happened to you?” I blurted. “I mean, I know what happened, but do you have to come up with money?”

  “Yeah, dude. But you know me. Blood from a fuckin’ turnip. Fuck those guys. I’m making myself scarce. I’m going to fuckin’ Canada, dude.”

  “Canada . . . ?” I grabbed Marlboros off the counter display and set them in front of him and he picked them up, started tapping the pack against his palm and said, “Thanks, bro.”