Kids These Days

by Drew Perry

  Except something already didn’t balance: His gun was funny, for one. It was like he was shooting firecrackers—though they were bigger than that. One hit the ground and did nothing, a black sphere the size of a golf ball. Another landed in front of the squad car that had us parked in, bounced underneath it, rolled out the other side and burst into pink flame. They were flares. He was shooting safety flares. Alice pushed Delton onto the porch floor, got down there with her, held onto Maggie. I opened the door of the SUV that was furthest from all of it, dragged the twins out, ran them up to Alice. “What are you doing?” she wanted to know. I pushed the twins closer to her. It was the only thing I knew to do. I would have pushed them inside her if I could.

  Mid was circling now, holding the gun in his left hand and firing cowboy-style, letting his whole arm bounce with each shot. He wasn’t even aiming. It was a show. He was laughing. Or singing. The white sail over his head looked like a rip in the sky. The grass was smoldering where the flares burned. He was going to take down the whole forest, the house, everybody. He’d make the news after all. A hundred acres burned to ash. Story at eleven.

  And I did not see what happened next so much as imagine later what it must have been, paint it out by numbers once things had sufficiently slowed: He’d stopped shooting—I knew that much—and as he flew away from us, toward the far end of the field, one of the sheriff’s deputies near us stood back up, put his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. It was a smooth, simple motion. The noise of it. The sheer noise. Nothing happened. Mid flew on. He did not evaporate in a fireball, did not turn, did not try to land. The deputy shouldered the rifle again, and I took off running from the front porch, started counting steps—ten, eleven, twelve—and I focused on his ear, stared at his ear as I got closer and closer, the folds, the pinches of skin, and I was in the air and through him before it ever occurred to me to worry about what would happen after we landed.

  We hit so hard that at first I could not tell the difference between ground and sky. I huddled on my side trying to figure out what it might take to breathe again, trying to make note of what I could still feel and what I couldn’t. I had grass in my mouth. Blood. I held my arms up at my ears, waiting for them to start beating me, kicking me. I listened for Alice. I saw the rifle lying well away. The cop I’d tackled was still on his back. We’d hit our heads together. I wasn’t sure if he was conscious. I saw the deputy who was still standing drawing his pistol, aiming the gun at my chest, yelling at me to freeze, to put my hands in the air, two competing ideas I didn’t think it was right to leave me to choose between. I saw he was shaking. It wasn’t Mid they were going to kill. It was me.

  Over the deputy’s shoulder I watched Mid continue on his line down the field, only lower now—lower, I could see, than the tops of the trees—and he did nothing other than sail directly into them. It was hard to call what happened a crash. He did not swerve or bank. He just flew into the trees. The cart hit first, bounced off and fell a few feet, and then the parachute caught him, snagged up in the branches so that the whole rig hung in the air. The engine ran a full beat, maybe two, before it cut off. The only sound left was Carolyn screaming to him, and him not answering. The deputy kept his gun on me. Nothing moved in the cart. Friendly and Helpful had their guns drawn, too, but they were aiming at the deputy. He didn’t even look like he’d need to shave every day. The other cops were coming at us on the run, yelling at everyone to wait, to holster their weapons. Carolyn made it to the end of the field, was standing directly under him, and now she was yelling back to us, screaming, “Somebody help!” Begging us. “Somebody do something! Somebody somebody somebody!”

  Friendly grabbed the deputy who had his pistol out, spun him around, and punched him in the face. It was an uncomplicated thing. The arc of his fist. The sound of it against the kid’s head. The kid went down. Then Friendly got in the Crown Vic and drove to Carolyn, to Mid, or almost to them, because he hit something down there, something metal in the grass, hit it hard enough to spin the car sideways, put it up on two wheels for a moment before it came back down again. He ran the rest of the way and started trying to climb the tree. Helpful called whoever it was he had on the other end of his fancy phone, said he wanted a helicopter. The deputy I’d tackled was sitting up now. He was cut along the bridge of his nose. I felt like I might have knocked one of my shoulders loose from the socket. Nobody put me in handcuffs. Nobody shot me. Up on the porch, Alice had pulled all four kids back through the front door of the cabin, and she had her body between them and everything else. She was staring at me, not blinking, not moving. My head hurt. My shoulder hurt. I got up and went to her, asked her if she was alright, if the kids were. “I’m sorry,” I told her, wanting that to stand in for everything. “I love you. I’m sorry. I am.”

  “What happened to Dad?” Delton asked. She was crying. “Did they just shoot him?”

  “I don’t know,” I must have said, reaching for Alice, for all of them. I almost could not hear, could not see, could not taste.

  Delton said, “Is he going to be OK?”

  I was cold, I realized, for the first time since we’d moved. “Somebody’s coming,” I told her. “There’s going to be a helicopter.”

  “How are they going to get him down?”

  “They’ll get him down,” I said. Friendly was halfway up the tree, standing on a limb in his suit. Still no movement in the cart. “There are people who know how to do this,” I said, wanting to make it true. I felt Alice’s hand on my back, a small circle of heat. I turned around just to make sure.

  At the hospital, we ate candy bars from the machine. We bought out their supply of anything with peanuts in it. They’d already told us we wouldn’t get to go back to see him. Maggie stretched out along a row of seats and tried to go to sleep, kept pretending to wake from a nightmare. She’d sit up, eyes wild, and one of the twins would pretend to calm her back down again, pat her hair. It was not quite a game, but it was enough to keep them busy.

  What we knew: He’d been hit. That he’d already had one surgery, and they were talking about a second. That one of his lungs had collapsed, or was collapsing. Carolyn was back there with him. She’d ridden in the helicopter. It was Carolyn who was coming out to give us updates, to tell us they had him sedated, to tell us they’d posted an officer outside his room. Friendly and Helpful had one of their guys out there, too, she said—they had guys—to watch the officer watching Mid. He had broken bones. He had pieces of the cart in his shoulder. The bullet had done something Carolyn couldn’t quite explain, had hit one thing and bounced off another. He’d lost a lot of blood. A GSW does a lot of damage, she told us. Alice asked what that was. Gunshot wound, Carolyn said. She’d learned the lingo. She had emergency powers. They were trying to decide when to wake him up, she was telling us, and they didn’t want to wake him up until they knew if they wanted to go back in.

  We hadn’t seen Carolyn in an hour. Alice thought that meant they were back in surgery. I said we did not know what it meant.

  When we’d first gotten to the hospital, the sun was going down, and it lit the sky three hundred shades of orange on its way out, turned even the parking lot into something it wasn’t, something fabulous, something adorned. But now night had come on, and out the window there was only the same darkness everybody everywhere else got, interrupted by the same sodium lights. Somewhere out there was the ocean. Somewhere out there was the Twice-the-Ice.

  They’d flown him to Jacksonville, to the same hospital where we expected the BOJ to make her appearance sometime around Christmas. Maybe we’d get a helicopter ride, too. Or at least a star in the east. Mid would be healed by then, would be showing off his scars. “That’s where it went in,” he’d say, showing us his shoulderblade. Then he’d turn around, face us, pull his shirt to one side, show us a cigar burn of a scar, and say, “And that’s where it came out.” Whether he’d show us in the visiting quarters of the state penitentiary or in his own wine pantry, I had no idea.

  Delto
n sat down between Alice and me. She looked otherworldly. Exhausted. We all must have. “Nic wants to come,” she said, holding up her phone like he was inside it. “Is that OK?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Cool,” she said.

  “Tell him to bring some burgers or something,” Alice said. “The kids need to eat. You need to eat.”

  “I will,” she said. She got up again, walked back over to the wall where she’d been sitting, curled herself into a ball.

  “Do you think she’s alright?” I asked Alice.

  She said, “Would you be?”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Do you think she will be?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we’ll all get lucky like that.”

  Earlier, after Carolyn had come out to bring us the first piece of news—that he was alive—Alice had said this to me about tackling the deputy: “What if he’d shot you, too?”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that,” I said.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “I don’t think I was. I just did it.”

  “I need you,” she said. “We need you. You can’t leave.”

  “I’m not leaving,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am,” I said. “I’m right here.”

  She said, “It’s different now. You have to know that.”

  “I do know it,” I said.

  “We don’t know anything,” she said. “That’s what’s so crazy.”

  “We’ll learn it,” I said.

  “How?” she said.

  All this was at the coffee machine, which was next to the candy machine. There was also a soda machine and a water machine. We could see everybody from where we were standing, all four girls, could make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be.

  “We need to think of a name,” Alice said. “A real name.”

  “We will.”

  “I want to start. I don’t want anything to happen and us not have a name.”

  “When we get through this,” I said. “We’ll get through this, get home, and we’ll get her a name.”

  “Or him,” she said.

  “It’s a girl,” I said.

  “I know. I know it is.”

  “Or him,” I said.

  Mid strafing us from an ultralight. A baby girl up there on the television screen, live from the belly of the whale. There was nothing that was not possible anymore.

  We slept at the hospital because that seemed right, but by morning what seemed better was to get Alice home, get her in a true bed. They had done the second surgery, and everybody was happy. He was critical but stable. There were other classifications, Carolyn told us. Worse ones. Given the conditions, he was in good shape.

  The idea was for Delton and Nic to take a real turn at playing house, take the twins and Maggie back to the castle for showers, breakfast, changes of clothes. Some kind of normal routine. We offered to do it, but Carolyn and Delton seemed to have arrived at a new arrangement, however temporary. What I thought Carolyn might know was this: Her pregnant sister needed rest. Her husband had been shot out of the sky and was now hooked up to tubes and bags, reactors and centrifuges. He needed someone to sit by him in his time of need, watch fluids go into his body and come back out. She could only do so many things.

  We drove south. With the sun streaming through the windows and into our laps, Alice soon enough fell asleep, which left me to spin the radio dial back and forth. I wanted something to half-hear underneath all the noise in my head. My shoulder hurt, my back, my whole body. I watched signs for golf courses go by, for amusement parks two hours’ drive from where we were, surf shops even farther still. If we were not in paradise, there was at least a billboard every five miles that would tell us how many exits were left before we got there. I saw egrets in the medians, stark white against the persistent green of everything else. The only time the land was not green was when it had been blackened by fire this year or last, and even then, out at the edges of the char and up above the burn lines on those trees left standing, there was new green. The flatness. There was nothing anywhere to make you believe the land did not extend this way forever. I punched in radio stations from our old life, familiar numbers. For whatever reason it seemed to me that they might carry down out of the hills and travel this far. I got nothing, of course. Static. We had left behind nearly anything I’d ever known.

  I got us parked in the lower level of the garage, got Alice upstairs and into the bed, brought her water and juice and half a cup of coffee, told her to call me if she needed anything. I said I was going to take a quick ride, look in on Mid’s life and make sure everything was still alright. Be careful, she said. Of what? I said. Of everything, she said. I got back downstairs, got in the hatchback, put it out on the highway, and headed for St. Augustine. I’d do what she asked, I was telling myself. I would keep a fair distance. I would exercise caution. But there was something I needed to know.

  When did we move here? Our daughter would ask us. Before you were born, we’d say. I thought about my parents’ stories, how when they’d talk about the lives they’d led before my brothers and I were born, it felt invented. Flickering. They had not been real people until we were there—we were sure of it, even if we never said so. Before you were born, I would tell her, there was nothing. No heavens and earth, no sky, no sea, no fish, no birds, no air. Thank God you came when you did. Your mother and I had begun to think we had certain things figured out. We wrote them into the lease. We felt sure we knew those things were true.

  I drove over the bridge, through downtown, and out the other side. I found the two astrologers’ houses. I shut the radio off, the AC off, rolled the windows down. I got lost. I ended up back out on the main road more than once. But I found it—I found the orange house, the empty yard, the flatbed with its mannequin leg, its Christmas lights. The lights were not on. There was no other car. There was a chicken sitting on the ground by a rusting toolshed. It was not moving, but it was alive. There was no Twice-the-Ice, which was what I’d come to see. I’d wanted to know if Mid was right—about that, about any of it. I guess I’d thought it would be there in the yard, the brilliant white fact of it plugged in and hooked up, Pete Brett dressed in full pirate garb and filling cooler after cooler with brand-new ice. But it was not. And without it, all the answers crowded in again, all at once: The company had repossessed it. The crime syndicate had stolen it. Pete Brett had it hidden somewhere else. He’d junked it for parts. He’d dumped it in the sea. It had never been there in the first place, or it had only winked into being when we were there to see it. The front door of the house opened, and I drove away, heart drumming hard. I did not wait to see who was coming out. I did not want whoever it was to see me.

  Alice was still asleep when I got home. I called the hospital, and the nurse said Carolyn was sleeping, too. I hung up and walked out onto our back balcony, looked down at the beach. It was crowded—umbrellas, tents, children everywhere. There was a sand bar a hundred yards out into the water, and some older kids were trying to surf the few small waves it was kicking up. Every now and then one of them would get up, ride all the way in to shore.

  It terrified me, what had happened to Mid. Not the shooting. What spooked me was what had come before—whatever it was that nudged him past the vision of himself he thought he’d mastered and into whoever it was flying that thing, singing and shooting flares. I held tighter to the railing, looked down at the grass between the building and the dunes, wondered if I’d survive a fall. I wanted to know if Mid had felt it coming. Not if he’d known what was going to happen, necessarily, but that something was. If he’d known how close it would come to killing him. I looked south, looked for Hank. I wanted to see the POW-MIA chute, the green cart, whatever extra flag was called for on a day like today. But he wasn’t there. The sky was empty. I went back inside, crawled into bed next to Alice, listened to the steady rhythm o
f her breath.

  “Maybe if you guys move, I can still use this as a place to hang out,” Delton said. This was days later. Mid was still in the hospital, though he was out of ICU. Shattered clavicle, shattered shoulder, broken arm, collapsed lung. Screws and pins. Carolyn and the kids were sleeping at home again. Delton was still with us. We were taking the foil back off her walls. Her idea.

  “Why would we move?” Alice asked. The strips were coming down in smaller pieces than they’d gone up. We were balling everything together in the center of the floor. Delton was up on a ladder, pulling thumbtacks out and dropping them in a cereal bowl.

  “After Dad goes to jail or whatever. Except there’s no way he’s going to jail.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Nic says he did it on purpose.”

  “Did what on purpose?” Alice said. She sat down on the end of the bed. Delton uncovered a window, and light washed in.

  “He says he has to be going for the whole insanity thing.” I wasn’t in any way certain you could get out of drug possession and tax evasion and whatever else they’d have him on with an insanity plea, but I didn’t say so. “Nic says it’s brilliant,” she said, smiling at everything that came with that.

  “Sweetie,” Alice said, “you know you can talk to us, right?”

  “Sure,” Delton said. “Why?”

  “We just want you to know that if you ever need somebody to listen, we’re right here.”