Reel to Real

by Joyce Nance

  “No, I don’t have another chick. She’s not my girlfriend. I don’t even like her. She’s just someone that thinks she has something going on with me ’cause I let her give me a ride now and then. She helps me out sometimes, that’s all. She’s fucking crazy. You’re way finer than she is, babe. Way finer.” He grabbed his jacket from the back of the kitchen chair.

  “Look here, I’m gonna go over there now and get her squared away, so she don’t bother us any more,” he said, frowning. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay, John. I’ll be here.” Crystal sank dejectedly into the couch.

  ***

  Loud banging echoed throughout the apartment. Esther, still up to her neck in bath water, splashed as she jerked herself up to a sitting position. The loud noise, she decided, was either a jackhammer or someone beating their head against the front door.

  Due to the large amounts of alcohol she consumed throughout the day, Esther’s head was a little mushy. Her eyes had accidentally closed for a moment and she had dozed off. The knocking jarred her. She didn’t know who it was or what to do about it.

  Then the noise got even louder so she got out of the tub, put a robe on, and crept towards the door.

  It might be John. He had a key but he might have forgotten it. Or … it might not be him. With her toughest, deepest sounding inflection, she yelled, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Ethan,” a familiar voice said.

  “Oh, fuck,” Esther said to herself. “Go away,” she yelled.

  The banging continued.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Esther yelled. “I said go away.”

  “Let me in,” he shouted. “If you don’t open up, I’m gonna break this damn door down. I swear I’ll bust it if I have to.” The pounding never paused.

  Fearing that someone might call the cops, Esther cracked open the door. She saw a pimply-faced, gangly teenager wearing a purple-and-green-striped polo shirt and chino shorts. His eyes bulged and his Adams’ apple throbbed. She realized he was staring at her in her threadbare, partially-tied, red robe.

  There was a long pause. “Are you okay?” the boy asked tentatively.

  "No," Esther said grimly, but motioned him inside.

  “Sorry to barge over,” Ethan stammered, suddenly bashful. He seemed shocked she had let him in, even though he had demanded it.

  He continued staring at her. “I just didn’t want anyone terminating theirself while I maybe could help them out,” he said. “Could I sit down for a sec? I think I wore myself out just now.”

  “Sure, yeah, go ahead,” she said, pointing towards the couch. “I guess I’m glad you’re here.”

  As he headed inside, Esther decided that this kid with pouty lips and thick, dark hair was not so bad looking after you got past the complexion problems and the weird clothes. She grabbed his wrist as he walked past her. He stared at her, eyes wide.

  “You like?” She took the clip from her hair and let it fall to her shoulders.

  He smiled big.

  “Wanna beer?” she asked.

  Not waiting for an answer, she pushed him out of her way and headed for the kitchen.

  ***

  Since John didn’t have a car, he had to make the arduous trip to Esther’s house on foot. Arduous because of the bullet he had taken to the lungs back in ’92 regarding a business mix-up.

  After walking about three blocks, he decided he had enough and called Shane for a ride. As he waited on a damp bus bench, John tried to remember why he had ever gotten involved with Esther in the first place. It wasn’t her looks and it definitely wasn’t her money. Then he remembered her large bosoms and her generosity. She did have a nice chest, he told himself. If he ever wanted anything like money or kinky sex and it was within her capacity to give it to him, she would do it. John found that endearing.

  But right now, John was worried about what Esther had going on in her head. Call it ex-con intuition, but somehow he knew, even over the phone, that she was freaking out in a bad way.

  Eventually Shane showed up and drove John to Esther’s apartment. He pulled his sports car right in behind Esther’s station wagon.

  “Bro,” John said to Shane as the car came to a stop. “I need your gun. I gotta bad feeling she’s got something going on up there. I need protection.”

  Nodding, Shane went to the rear of his car and removed a chrome .45 he kept in a first-aid kit behind the spare. He also grabbed a fully loaded magazine stashed inside the same kit and shoved it into the gun.

  “Go get ’em, man,” Shane said with a smirk, slapping the gun into John’s big hand.

  When John got up to Esther’s apartment, he heard noises that didn’t sound right. Scratching his head, he pushed his ear against the door. His mouth dropped and his eyes popped when he heard what was definitely a man’s voice inside. He stepped back and did a slow burn.

  “What the hell?” he said out loud. Was Esther stupid enough to bring another man over to her house just because he was indisposed for a couple of days? It appeared she was.

  Using the key she had given him, he went inside. The apartment was dark and the living room empty. John looked around, saw no one and stepped toward the bedroom. He heard squeaking and moaning as he approached the closed door.

  He turned the knob and entered, fury engulfing him. He saw Esther and a man he didn’t know lying in her bed, naked. When Esther saw him, she gasped and scrambled to hide the boy with the bedcovers. That didn’t work.

  John walked over to where they lay and loomed over them. “What the fuck’s going on here?” he said, his deep voice clipped.

  When he got no answer, he jerked the covers back, prompting Esther to try to shield Ethan with her body. That also didn’t work. John knocked her to the floor and roughly grabbed the boy by the arm, causing him to let out a yowl. John’s nostrils flared as he yanked the terrified teen to a standing position.

  “S-stop,” Ethan said, shaking. “Let me go. I’ll get my clothes and get outta here. I’ll leave.”

  John ignored Ethan’s pleas and shoved him with bruising force against the bedroom wall. The teenager’s head hit the plaster with a thunk. “What the fuck you think you’re doing, son?” John demanded.

  “Sorry, mister. Sorry. Let me go.”

  His feet off the ground and his naked body crushed against the wall, Ethan tried to squirm from John’s unrelenting grip. The twisting infuriated John even more, which made him squeeze even harder.

  “You got no right to mess with this woman, boy, no right. She’s mine. You’re going to pay,” John yelled into his ear.

  Ethan continued to thrash but got nowhere. John ordered him to stay still and when the boy failed to comply, he reached into the small of his back and pulled out the pistol Shane had given him. He pushed it into Ethan’s temple and Ethan instantly stopped twitching and went stone cold still.

  “What’s your name?” John shouted while Esther pulled at his arms and begged him to let the boy go. Using his left elbow, he threw her off, propelling her backwards, back onto the floor.

  “I said, what’s your name boy?”

  “Ethan,” the teenager said, choking back tears. “My name’s Ethan.” His eyes protruded and he held his breath.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Two buildings over,” Ethan said in small puffs.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  John’s eye-brows shot up.

  “Seventeen?” The number ricocheted in his head. “What the fucking fuck?” he said as last. “You’re not even fucking eighteen?”

  Ethan shook his head.

  “Go get me your damn wallet, boy,” John demanded in disgust, and dropped the teen to the ground. Ethan scurried to obey. Wallet in hand, John walked over to the table lamp and squinted at length at Ethan’s driver’s license. He finally stood up and turned to a pale, cowering Esther still sitting on the floor.

  “God damn it, Esther. You’re fucking a damn kid.”

  “I
didn’t know that, John. I swear I didn’t know.”

  As Esther and John argued, Ethan scampered to put on his pants. He grabbed the rest of his clothes and quietly crept toward the door, but John eventually noticed his movements.

  “Yeah, that’s right, punk. Get your candy-ass outta here and stay out. You better keep your fucking mouth shut on this, too. I know who you are. I seen your wallet. Get out. I don’t want to ever see your fucking sorry ass near her again.”

  February 17, 1996

  Ethan’s home was an older three bedroom apartment that he shared with his parents and two younger sisters. His mother was big into thrift store shopping, so almost the entire apartment was decorated in mismatched items purchased from the Goodwill.

  When he returned home, his mother noticed the scratches on his cheek, even though he tried to hide them by purposely pushing his hair over to that side of his face.

  “What in the hell happened to you?” she demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  “You smell like beer,” she said, and asked him if he’d been drinking. He said no. She asked him where he had been and he told her nowhere. She informed him that she already knew he had been at Esther’s apartment because the next-door neighbor’s kid had told her as much when she returned from grocery shopping.

  “I only went there to help her because she said she was desperate,” Ethan confessed. He explained that Esther had told him over the phone that she might kill herself and he felt morally obligated to go over there and try to stop her.

  “I was just trying to help,” he said.

  “You should have just called the damn cops,” his mom said. “I’ve told you a million times, mind your own damn business.”

  Ethan hoped his mom would not make a big deal about his visit to Esther, but she informed him in a voice he was certain could be heard for miles that Esther was not someone he should be hanging out with under any circumstances. She was way too old for him — something like forty — and not only that, she had been in the penitentiary.

  Then his dad walked in and things got a whole lot worse. His dad wanted explicit details. He wanted to know why Ethan had a scratched-up face and what was that blue discoloration on his neck that looked like a bruise? What, exactly, had happened over there?

  His dad's yelling got louder and louder until Ethan couldn’t take it anymore. He told his dad that a man named John, whom he believed might have once been an inmate in prison, came over to Esther’s house while he was there. He also told hm that John seemed to have a pretty bad temper and appeared to be really mad at Esther.

  “Then when he saw me, he got even madder,” Ethan admitted, biting his lip. “So mad he put a gun to my head. But I really think he was just trying to scare me.”

  Ethan’s dad went ballistic when he heard about the gun. He immediately snatched up the phone and dialed the Albuquerque Police Department.

  “I want to report a crime,” Ethan’s dad said. Then he gave the dispatcher his own name, his home address and a short description of the offense.

  “No, Dad, please. Please don’t tell the cops,” Ethan screamed in the background. “I do not want to talk to them.”

  Ethan started hyperventilating and pleaded with his dad to hang up, but it was too late. The dispatcher informed Ethan’s dad that a unit would be sent over right away. Ethan ran screaming into his room and locked the door.

  The police showed up about fifteen minutes later and Ethan knew he was screwed. His dad was going to force him to retell the story about John and the gun. He definitely did not want to mention the part about being naked in bed with Esther, and would try very hard to leave that information out.

  He was smart enough to realize that when the police took his statement about the gun they would then go directly to John’s house. He knew that if John got into any type of legal difficulty because of this incident, he would blame any and all of his problems on him. He knew that if this incident ended up escalating, which it looked like it would, John would come gunning for him and would most likely kill him the moment he had a chance.

  He sat perched on the edge of his bed in his room, holding his knees and rocking himself. Then he heard his dad talking loudly to a cop at the front door and his heart rate, already high, notched itself up several more beats per second.

  The loud voices were moving toward his bedroom.

  Ethan desperately wished he had never answered that phone call from Esther. In an effort to calm himself, he vowed to stay far away from chicks who had done time in prison, especially old chicks, and super-especially old chicks with psycho ex-con boyfriends.

  But that was in the future, if he had one. For the time being, he had only one thought, which was that he was so very, very dead.

  Chapter 6

  “One day might be different from another, but there ain't much difference when they're put together.”

  WILLIAM H. ARMSTRONG

  Things went from worse to terrible for Esther and John. He let her know that everything was all her fault.

  “You better fix this,” he snapped before he left her apartment. “I do not want to go back to prison because of you. You better keep that boy’s fucking mouth shut.”

  She said she would.

  As soon as John left, two police officers showed up at Esther’s apartment, looking for him. Esther told them he wasn’t there, but they wanted to come inside anyway.

  “There’s been a report of a felony at this location ma’am. Can we come in?” Patrolman Gomez asked, his face expressionless. “Someone called in an assault with a deadly weapon. We need to find out what happened.”

  Esther let them in and more or less told them what happened. She omitted the part about having sex with a seventeen year old. That would have just gotten her in a lot more trouble that she didn’t need.

  She told the police that Ethan had been over for a short visit and her boyfriend had misconstrued his presence into something crazy, something that it wasn’t. It was just a big misunderstanding, she said, and the most important thing was that no one had actually been hurt.

  The officer was unmoved by Esther’s attempt to minimize events. He asked her for John’s last name. Patrolman Gomez ran the name through his computer and found John Lausell identified as a parolee who was prohibited by law from possessing firearms.

  The sergeant also ran Esther’s name through the computer and told her the incident would be reported to her parole officer as well.

  ***

  After they left Esther’s apartment, Shane and John criss-crossed the streets of Albuquerque for hours, sorting things out.

  “Why the fuck did the bitch have to go and pull that kind of shit now?” John asked, veins bulging in his forehead.

  “She’s out to get you,” Shane replied evenly.

  “Wha-at? Why?”

  “To pay you back for the other chick.”

  “The other chick? Crystal? She doesn’t know nothing about Crystal. I told her nothing.”

  “Chicks always know about that kind of shit.”

  Eventually, John decided he needed to go back to Esther’s place and re-enforce his edict regarding her duty to keep the kid’s mouth shut. But as bad luck would have it, when John and Shane turned onto Candelaria Road, they saw a police car pulling up in front of Esther’s apartment building.

  “Hold up, junior,” John said, ducking down in his seat. “There’s fucking cops over there and …

  and ... and I can’t believe it. There’s that goddamn kid again.”

  John raised his head to peek through the bottom of the dirty passenger-side window. “He’s getting out of the cop car now.” John paused, his mouth forming a jagged 'O.’ “He’s crazier than I thought. What the fuck does he think he’s doing going back over here?” He slammed the palms of his hands against his thighs. “I shoulda took his fucking ass out when I had the chance. Son-of-a-bitch. Goddamn Esther has done it to me now.”

  Shane sat in the driver’s seat, quietly smoking a cigarette while
John spat out each new development. “You can’t go there now, bro,” Shane said matter-of-factly. The engine idled quietly as they watched the scene unfold from behind a parked van. “They’re out there waiting to bust you. We gotta blow.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. We gotta get outta here,” John said, a profound frown on his face. He sat back up. “Matter a fact. I need to get my black ass outta town. Now.”

  ***

  On the best nights of her vacation, Crystal slept like a baby. Tonight, however, there would be no sleeping. Not with everything that had gone on. She was wide awake.

  When the phone rang, she jumped. It was the Albuquerque Police Department and they were looking for John.

  “He’s not here,” Crystal said.

  “Okay, we were just checking. That’s fine,” the dispatcher said. “Thank you.”

  Five minutes later, APD called back and told Crystal to come out of the apartment, the SWAT team was waiting outside the door.

  “Shit. You’re kidding me!” Crystal said, straightening up. “Can you give me a sec? I’ve gotta put some jeans on.”

  “Quickly,” the officer said.

  Once outside, she was surprised by the number of law enforcement personnel crowded around the apartment complex. It looked like the entire SWAT team plus a few plainclothes detectives. They told her to put her hands up and walked her over to a somber-faced man with a thick brown mustache and aviator glasses. He introduced himself as Detective Hayes and asked her if John was inside. She told him no.

  The detective told her bad things could happen if it turned out she was lying.

  “I’m aware of that,” Crystal replied.

  “We’re going to need to go in there to make sure,” Detective Hayes said. “We have reason to believe he’s in there.”

  “Fine.”

  Six APD officers dressed in full body armor marched inside, guns drawn. They swept through the studio apartment, looking for John Lausell. The rest of the cops stayed outside with Crystal. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the railing, looking dour, waiting for them to finish. One of the cops informed Crystal that John had been in an earlier altercation with a woman and another man at the woman’s apartment. Firearms were involved, he said.