The Wrong Man

by Louis, Matthew

  “You ought to stick around, man,” I said. “Owen’s due by here any minute to fuckin’ kill me.”

  “Dude!” He became hushed and serious, and glanced behind him, looking for Owen. “I heard about that! Fuck, why’d you call the cops on him?”

  My heart sank. I explained myself to Rich, emphatically, as if he could help me. I guess the logic was that he could start spreading the rumor the other way, telling the right people—or people who might tell the right people—that I was a hundred percent victim of circumstance.

  “That’s fucked up,” Rich said, amusement breaking through, glad that his turn was over and that for all his stupidity he wasn’t in as deep as me. Then he looked away and looked back. “What time you get outta here?”

  I frowned. No way I was getting pulled into the orbit of Rich’s idiocy—ever again, I had decided—but I said, “Ten, just like always.”

  “Oh.” He knit his brows, not asking me to hang out after all. “Hey, you think I can get one more pack for my driver? I’ll pay you for it.”

  I looked out and saw a little red Japanese go-cart with gray primer on the fender. I couldn’t make out the driver but he was no friend of mine and I didn’t need to give him smokes. “Pay me when?”

  Rich looked at me and I could see him trying to do something cute with that wrecked face. “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for some Marlboros today.”

  I suddenly felt like throwing something at him, yelling, kicking him in the ass and chasing him off. “No way, man. You already owe for a dozen packs. Share the ones you got, asshole.”

  I saw something like surprise, maybe even anger, flicker in his good eye and then vanish. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. Well, I’ll send you a postcard from Canada, bro. Hey, thanks for the smokes. Seriously.”

  He was retreating as he spoke and then he was gone. I watched the little Japanese car pull away, the weight of my impending doom settling onto my thoughts again. And then I slapped the countertop. I had forgotten to find out what had become of the pound of weed. Jesus, that could get us off the hook! I hustled out to the parking lot to wave them down but they had already driven out of sight.

  During the minutes before closing it got worse, not better. It wasn’t the home stretch, it was the danger zone; the handiest time to get me. It was so intense that when I finally found myself driving away with the store locked behind me, I started laughing a strange laugh that I had never experienced before. Nothing at all was funny, but I guess that tension simply must escape. I grinned and I started thinking that maybe, maybe it would all blow over now. Sully must have gotten hold of Owen, and maybe I was granted some kind of reprieve in some goofy-ass court of coked-up gangsters. It was going to be fine.

  The door to our apartment was unlocked when I got home. I didn’t panic then, but I stepped in quick and said, “Jill?”

  There was no answer.

  I closed the door, my heart picking up tempo. Nobody was in the living room but the bathroom door was closed with the stripe of light under it, so I didn’t think much about anything yet. When I walked into our bedroom, I stopped and blinked, completely dumbfounded. The bed was not just unmade, the blanket and top sheet were ripped away, drooling onto the floor, leaving the fitted sheet totally exposed. Three of our four pillows were mashed against the headboard. The fourth was obviously on the floor on my side of the bed where I couldn’t see it. We had matching bedside lamps and the one on Jill’s side was on the floor. Beside it was a pair of her panties.

  I stared for a long moment, feeling the way you feel when you’re looking at books in the warm safe environment of the library and you come across those old pictures of war atrocities or hollow-eyed, skeletal prisoners in death camps gazing frankly at the camera. What I was seeing wouldn’t fit into my understanding of reality. It disturbed me on a level I couldn’t have prepared for. I had a weird thought of Jill screwing someone else on our bed, and me coming home while they were halfway into it, but I knew that was impossible.

  “Jill?” My voice was louder and shrill, and I was up against the bathroom door now. I rapped three times and said, “Jill!” then rapped again.

  The toilet flushed. I heard rustling, feet on the floor, and the latch clicked and the door came open.

  She was naked.

  “I need . . . to take a shower,” she said. Her face was bloodless and without expression, her eyes huge and empty.

  “What? Jill! Look at me.” I took her shoulders. There was a bruise on her neck, the size of a thumbprint. I already knew. “Did someone come in here?”

  “They . . . they knocked,” she said, and took a huge breath, as if thinking of it exhausted her. “There were two of them. A white guy and a-a-another guy, and they just backed me in there.” She glanced at the bedroom.

  I think I said “No!” but maybe I didn’t. There was a humming growing in my ears, speckles in my vision, and I might have rolled my eyes up in my head and passed out if Jill hadn’t started crying.

  It was just a sniffle at first, but it brought me back like smelling salts, made me smart with the knowledge of who the goddamned victim was here. She was starting to shake, and I reached out, pulled her against me and began rubbing the silky planes of her back and telling her everything was all right.

  But even then a blinding rage, a need to do something, was clouding my thinking. We were going to the police. Modern investigative techniques would turn the motherfuckers up and I would arm myself, go into the courtroom during their trial and execute them. Right through the face. The cops could drag me away after that. I didn’t give a fuck.

  “We have to go the police,” I said into her hair, my voice sounding thin, almost metallic. “Go to the doctor, do all that.”

  “There’s nothing!” she sobbed into my shoulder. “Sam, they had on ski masks.” And lower, she said, “The even used rubbers. All I could tell, the first guy, he was white, and the other guy was dark. Mexican––probably.”

  And it came to me. Hit me so hard I felt the breath go out of me. Owen Ferguson. Oh Christ, he had given up on getting me at the liquor store but that guy wouldn’t just give up altogether, would he? How could I not know that he would teach me, one way or another, what happens when some punk crosses him? My body felt so hot it might begin steaming. My rage was suddenly corrupted by guilt and the combination was so poisonous my knees were buckling.

  “Jill, I think—”

  “Sam?” Her voice was thick with crying now, tinged with hysterics, and it took her a couple of times to get it out. “I want you to take . . . I want to go . . . to my mom’s!” And with the last word she began sobbing too hard to speak.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, Jill.”

  I nearly had to carry her into the bedroom to get her dressed.

  We were mostly silent and Jill didn’t seem to want to be touched on the drive. All I could think about was Owen, but I couldn’t bring myself to put any of it into words. I tried to comfort her a couple of times but wound up stammering and rambling, promising again and again that we were going to move out of the apartment, we were going to move far away from Blackmer.

  Her mom answered the door, looking like hell. The woman was a waitress with a raspy voice and bleached gray hair. She was long divorced from Jill’s father and remarried to a tough little Filipino biker. They lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a tiny, grubby house that smelled of their pugs, Vinnie and Minnie, and their cigarette smoke. I hadn’t phoned ahead. I walked Jill to the door and delivered her inside. She kept saying, “I’m fine now. I’m fine,” as we went up the darkened walkway. She seemed a little irritated with me but I didn’t dwell on it and went ahead with my duty. I began trying to explain to her mother, saying, “Two guys . . . they . . . they came into our place . . .” my speech halting idiotically until Jill threw me a look and recited the basic facts in an eerily tranquil voice.

  I assumed her mother would get her through the police and medical stuff, and was ashamed at how glad I was to be avoiding it. As soon as I
could I began inching toward the door, saying, “Listen, I got some stuff to do.”

  Jill sat at the dining room table, which was a few feet from the front door. She didn’t look disappointed or hurt by the idea of my leaving. She didn’t even seem to hear me. Her mother glanced at the clock and said, “I hope you don’t have any stupid ideas, Sam!”

  I said, “No, no, I don’t,” and slipped out the door, my heart pounding, pulling the cool night air into my lungs like I’d been suffocating. I made it to my car in the damp dark evening, in that sleeping, ugly, lower class neighborhood, relishing the solitude, reveling in the sudden silence, relaxing with the momentary relief from the high, tense feedback of misery emanating from Jill.

  But it was a false calm. I was a momentary escapee, hugging myself against a tree in the midnight woods, catching my breath as the hounds barked and bayed and closed distance behind me. And I was sprinting again in no time, charging ahead into this new wilderness of troubles, this waking nightmare, and knowing it couldn’t turn out any way but fucked.

  5

  I kept the Fairlane at seventy-five along the deserted highway and got off at the familiar exit back in Blackmer. Mist was visible under the street lamps. The red traffic lights blinked over the deserted intersections. Thick clouds drifted in front of a full white moon like the backdrop in a vampire movie. I rolled into Baron Square and parked next to Rancho Bonita, the Mexican place across from Vanguard, and did something for which I should be dead.

  How do you explain this? I guess it’s what guys do in war. They march into fire when everything in them shrieks to turn and run, to dive for cover, to cry and beg God or the enemy or fate to spare them. But they tromp onward with the bullets streaking past, blowing heads apart and snapping into chests and limbs, with bombs detonating and their friends doubling over, disemboweled, screaming, in little pieces. And at the end of it they’re either dead, they wish they were dead, or they’re appalled by their own ridiculous luck.

  My palm hit the worn, metal plate and the door swung open. It was after one a.m. in the middle of the week and the barroom was alive in a slow, dark way like a welter of snakes in the bottom of a pit.

  It was a small bar with a small stage in the corner where local bands and karaoke outfits set up a few times a week. The walls were spotted with the usual neon, relief tins from beer companies, and framed pictures meant to add character. There was a tropical Mexican motif, with a few clay parrots painted in primary colors and standing in metal rings suspended from the ceiling, and there was a shitty mural along the far wall that might have been painted by a ten-year-old, depicting a beach, blue skies and some palm trees.

  As I stepped in I caught a glimpse of myself in a big wall mirror. I was all wrong here. There was no hazy smile floating on my face, no trickle of noisy, happy nonsense on my lips. My mouth was mashed to a thin line, my nostrils spread, my eyes banged open so the irises were like holes punched in the dough of my face.

  I grimaced, tore my gaze away and scanned the fifteen-odd patrons. The obnoxious thumping and ranting from the corner speakers was black gangsta rap, the partiers were mostly Mexican with a couple of white wannabe gangsters in the mix and a couple of slutty white girls drinking and leering off in a corner. I knew I stood out in this ethnic, urban atmosphere. I looked like I belonged in Del Mar with the surfers and college kids. My heart was kicking like an animal trapped inside my chest cavity and it kicked harder with every step. But something in me had ruled out turning back. I would walk right into enemy fire. It was all I had tonight.

  I recognized Owen’s buzz-cut, evilly shaped cranium from across the room. He had his back to the bar, around its far curve, so his back was toward me when I spotted him. As I approached I saw the side of his face and heard snatches of his nasally voice. He was smirking and jabbering with his outthrust lower jaw, pint of beer in hand, amid the scariest collection of macho, dangerous gangsters you’d ever want to see; belligerent, loud, arrogant Mexican-Americans with thick, powerful builds and huge shirts and baggy pants; young men who had lost their youth, hanging with an air of drug-smoke, marked up with haphazard tattoos barely visible against their muddy skin, their dog-like hair cropped down to close black mats on their sloping skulls.

  I stepped toward them. Nobody was looking at me and I almost stopped, realizing the enemy hadn’t even opened fire yet—I could just sneak away, live to fight another day and all that. But then Owen’s gaze locked with mine as if he had been waiting for me. Something shifted behind his eyes, utter confusion and surprise, and then the veil of stone-cold killer-cool dropped over his face again and it was like that flash of humanity had never been there.

  I was standing three feet away. My hearing was clouded by blood pressure. The rap music and drunk conversations seemed like something off in the distance, the whole world a TV with the volume turned down. Everything seemed to have fallen away except the battered, malignant face of Owen Ferguson. He was wearing a loose, checkered, button-down shirt that looked right off the rack and he was holding a fresh pint of piss-colored beer at chest level. The Mexicans around him had gone silent, looking at me like they might explode to action and kill me any second.

  “You fucking stupid, Homes, or what?” Owen said in his jaw-sprung, perpetual Brando imitation.

  I found my voice wasn’t quite there. I wasn’t quite angry or high on adrenaline; all I had was the theoretical knowledge that I ought to be angry, that I ought to feel like killing, but I was deep inside my shell.

  I nodded and said, “Yeah, I’m fucking stupid,” so quiet I could hardly hear myself, and Owen watched, completely dumbfounded as my hand reached out and tipped his pint glass into his chin, washing the amber liquid down the front of his button-down shirt. I did it with my left hand, and I managed to square off during everyone’s collective gasp and immediately snap a punch into his cheek with my right. I had the satisfaction of seeing him cower against the bar, squinch his face and cover up with his hands for a split second, and I stepped back and elevated my fists in a silly boxer’s pose.

  “Let’s do it, bitch!” I said, so loud that the entire room stopped dead and watched. “Come on, you faggot rapist piece of shit! Bring it, motherfucker!” I heard my speech tinged with the pseudo-black street dialect the gangsters use and I had no idea where it came from. The action had cracked me out of my shell and I was suddenly a stranger to myself.

  There were four of Owen’s friends mere inches away, but I was guessing Owen would need to rescue his reputation by personally beating me, at which point I would beat him—to death if I could. That was the plan that I hadn’t articulated to myself. That’s what had brought me here, and that’s what I was expecting to happen when the plug was pulled on my consciousness.

  I learned later, of course, that one of the big Mexicans had simply set his feet and slammed a fist into the side of my head and then it had been basketball shoes, boots and fists striking me like bricks swung on the end of ropes.

  The bartender was a youngish Romeo-type with his hair slicked back from his widow’s peak and his chest hair coming out of his open collar. Maybe he recognized me as one of the clerks at Vanguard, or maybe he would have done the same for anyone, but he saved me, yelling, “Hey! Hey! I’m calling the cops! Knock it the fuck off right now!” as the gangsters stomped on me or bent down to land punches. I heard all this later, from the bartender himself, after I woke up to the sound of sirens. He actually did call the cops and even scampered around the bar, phone in hand, yelling and warding my attackers off, telling them there was a room full of witnesses. They had finally listened to him and hustled out and roared off in their lowered cars.

  As I crawled up to a stool it felt like half my face had been torn off. My fingers explored the parts of it that were bigger and squishier and sorer, and the parts of it that were split open. I needed ice and maybe stitches. The inside of my lip was shredded. At least one tooth was loose. My left thigh had a cruel cramp stitched into it and my left arm, around the elbow, felt e
ither sprained or broken.

  Two cops strolled in—the big one who had harassed Owen last night, and a smaller one with a mustache. They were both white. They sat at a table with me, two scrubbed healthy faces, two cropped scalps and black outfits, their crowded tool belts and bullet-proof vests making them stiff and awkward in sitting positions. The bartender worked with one ear cocked toward us. I told the cops I had no idea who had done it. Bunch of Mexicans, I said. My own fault, I said. I had a few drinks too many and I mouthed off and swung first.

  That was good enough for the cops, and they radioed it in as “mutual combat” and left, telling me I might want to get myself to the emergency room.

  Last call had come and gone by then and the place was empty. The bartender put both hands on the bar when the door shut behind the cops. He had big, glassy black eyes and the typical Latino caterpillar mustache sitting on his thick upper lip. He said, “That was smart, bro. You don’t want to rat on those guys. I was you, I’d go home and pack and leave town right now.”

  I thanked him for his advice through my damaged mouth and I dragged myself out. There was nobody waiting for me in the parking lot. I made it to my car and went home, but I didn’t pack and leave town.

  6

  My cousin Tommy had spent good portions of his life in county, state and federal lockups. He was well into his forties and usually had half a dozen girlfriends waiting in the wings that he liked to brag about but didn’t like anyone to actually see.

  When I was a kid his girlfriends looked like TV stars. They were wholesome or sleazy or somewhere in between; they were sprightly and high-breasted or busty and hippy or somewhere in between; they were blonde or brunette or redheaded or some mixed shade. But they were always something to look at. They never rated any lower than an eight-point-five, and it seemed they’d do anything for him. The last I’d heard, Tommy had made me eight second cousins by five different women.