“The sex is what changed my mind. I was always taught that sex is something awful, to be ashamed of, that you have to apologize to God for even thinking about. Your dead relatives in heaven watch you when you masturbate, right? But sex is wonderful! And I thought, if they were lying to me about sex, what else were they lying about?”
“Well, that’s a natural reaction,” said Cee. “Lots of us lose our faith over one thing or another. But many of us find life easier when we come back to it.”
Sarabeth suddenly peeled off her sweat-soaked tee shirt and stood there in her new sports bra.
“They wouldn’t even let me jog! I used to love running when I was a girl. Then I grew breasts, and they convinced me that I shouldn’t run any more. They said that men would be driven to sin just from watching my breasts bounce when I ran! But they wouldn’t let me wear a sports bra to hold down my breasts—noooo! A sports bra was somehow sinful. Show me where it says that in the bible!”
Cee smiled, and she smiled back. I knew he did well with women. They loved his dark eyes.
Me, I thought his eyes looked like two little piss holes in the snow.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “You have wisdom beyond your years.”
Sarabeth looked at me for confirmation of her wisdom. Instead, she saw my disapproval of Cee’s flirting and took it for disapproval of her.
“Oh, relax, Able! Plenty of girls wear just a sports bra. It’s practically the same as a halter top.”
“Yes,” said Cee. “You should be proud of Sarabeth, Able.”
“Say, how did you get a name like Cornthwaite, anyway?”
Oh, God, don’t ask him that! I prayed silently.
But God reminded me that He didn’t exist—He let Cee go into his speech.
“I’m named after a famous ancestor, Cornthwaite Hector. He was one of the founders of a town called Melbourne, Florida. Curiously, although he came to Florida by way of Australia and New Zealand, the Melbourne in Florida - “
“Florida? You’re from there? I always wanted to go to Disney World!”
I sighed, rose, and went back outside. The robin was still there. I threw both shoes at him, one at a time. They didn’t hit him, he just hopped out of the way. Couldn’t even be bothered to fly—he just hopped.
“If I still had my guns, you’d be nothing but feathers!” I said. But they took my guns away. They do that when you’ve been convicted of a felony.
I walked out to retrieve the shoes. The robin hopped a few feet away and looked at me. I threw the shoes at him again, and missed again. I was not doing the Marines proud. On the other hand, the Marines never trained me on throwing work shoes. The robin and I played this sad game until Cee exited and told me that I had to come back to the AA meetings. He’d escort me to one now if he had time, but he had to get to work.
He left, but I knew he’d be back. Not for me, but to get another glimpse of Sarabeth.
• • •
It was that afternoon that Sarabeth got to the inevitable question.
“I don’t know,” I said. That was the truth, too.
“How can you not know if you killed someone in Iraq?”
“Because you’re never alone—you’re squad is with you, and they’re probably shooting what you’re shooting at. So you don’t know which one of you actually shot the Muj. And because you don’t usually get to go and examine the corpses. Most of my work was protecting convoys. Someone shoots at us, I shot back with a big, turret-mounted 50 caliber machine gun. The convoy doesn’t stop, and whoever shot at you is soon behind you. And it’s worse at night—the muzzle flash from a 50 cal ruins your night vision.”
I cracked open a fresh bottle of tequila and poured myself a shot. “Now I’ve got some serious drinking to do. Go watch your cartoons.”
Sarabeth’s parents hadn’t let her watch TV. She loved SpongeBob.
Me, I loved drinking.
• • •
To my surprise, I slept OK that night. Sarabeth insisted that we both sleep naked, which was no hardship in the Texas heat. She spooned me from behind, one hand reaching around to hold my dick. She stayed like that all night, as if she was afraid that I was trying to run away. The one good thing about it was that I was sure I wouldn’t have a nightmare and hurt her. No hajji ever held my dick.
In my cynical moments, I decided that she figured that, if I did get away, at least she’d still have my dick. If she had that plus my wallet, that was all she needed of me.
• • •
Things seemed to go downhill after Cee visited.
“Hey, maybe we should go easier on the drinking, you think?” She had just downed a mixed drink called a Nutty Irishman, which is made with Bailey’s and Frangelica. Not one expensive type of alcohol. Two!
“Got to celebrate tomorrow. It’s a holiday: Juneteenth.”
“You celebrate the day Lincoln freed the slaves?”
“Of course. I’m a proud black man.”
“Really?”
“Really–truly. My great-grandmother Enid was a Negro. That makes me one-eighth black. If they still had laws in this state against miscegenation, young lady, you’d be breaking the law.”
This seemed to amuse her. “One-eighth? That makes you an octoroon, then?”
I nodded. “Stick around ‘til the Fourth of July, and I’ll take you to the big Spackman family picnic. You’ll see I got kin both black and white.”
She grabbed me by one hand and pulled me towards the bedroom. “Well, Mr. Octoroon, let’s find out if it’s true what they say about black men.”
But, try as I might, I couldn’t get it up that night. Not even the Cialis helped. I slept in the closet that night, but it didn’t keep the nightmares away.
I had a new dream that night. I dreamt of something we only did a few times, when Fallujiah was going crazy. My squad was sent on foot patrol.
This is how you do a foot patrol in an urban environment: The point man looks ahead and scans the roofs of buildings for snipers. The man behind him looks for snipers on the top floor, in the windows or on the balconies. The man behind him looks for snipers on the level below. And so on, down to ground level. (Of course, the Marine in back has to cover what’s behind you.)
I dreamt that I had the middle. Most buildings in Fallujah were only three stories tall. There were a few tall apartment buildings, but the majority were pretty short. I walked near the middle of the squad, looking for trouble on what we’d call the second floor. I kept glancing from side to side, because I was watching the buildings on both sides of the street.
Then, in my dream, the buildings became four stores tall. We didn’t stop and assign someone to watch the new floor. I did it.
Then the buildings were five stores tall, then six. I was watching an impossibly broad area. Any one of those windows might have snipers.
Now I was watching a dozen stories. I never saw an entire street of skyscrapers in Fallujah, but they did in my dream.
There was no way I could effectively cover so much terrain. We were keeping silence, but I gestured to my Sergeant. He ignored me.
Then a dozen Muj popped out of the windows that I was supposed to be covering and cut down my whole squad. I found cover under the wreck of a car, where I watched my guys getting cut down.
I woke up screaming in my closet. If Sarabeth heard me, she didn’t bother to get up.
• • •
Cee kept stopping by, and eventually he said that he couldn’t protect me from the law. I may have been an atheist, but a judge had sentenced me to go to AA meetings for three years. If I didn’t go back, my parole would be revoked. I still drank, but I went back to the meetings.
Barely a week after I started going back to AA, I got home one day to find Sarabeth’s stuff was gone.
It turned out that she had gone off with Cee. He took her back to Florida to see Disney World. And they stayed there.
I didn’t stop drinking and using drugs right away. The last drink I had was at that Fourth of July fa
mily picnic. That’s when I was disinvited to future family picnics.
• • •
So now I’m sober again. Will it last? I have no idea. I hope so, but what are hopes worth? I do know that, each time I have to get sober, it gets harder, not easier.
I never saw Sarabeth again. (Or Cee, for that matter, but him I don’t miss. I got a less-annoying sponsor after that.) But here’s the strange part: when I finally quit the drugs, my knee didn’t go back to hurting. It was as if her faith healing actually worked after all.
Did Sarabeth really cure me? Damn if I know.
Was it worth losing my sobriety, taking painkillers for my knee to trick Sarabeth into fucking me? That I do know. Oh yes, that one I know the answer to.
Chipping off the
Old Block
Nick Kolakowski
I.
Jake Thompson, sixteen years old going on a hardboiled forty, celebrated the Fourth of July by lighting a rag stuffed in the gas tank of his school principal’s Buick. He expected some merry flames, but what happened next took his life to a whole new level.
Jake’s friend Bucky stood ten feet behind the Buick, hopping from foot to foot like a cheap windup toy. Bucky had spent his formative years huffing glue out of paper bags and swallowing anything on his mother’s dresser that looked like a pill, frying his brain to the point where he couldn’t spell ‘dog’ unless you spotted him the ‘d’ and the ‘g.’ But he was loyal to Jake, which meant he was okay in Jake’s book, where the definition of a good guy was one who did as told.
“Get back a little bit,” Jake told him.
Bucky didn’t hear, or else the danger of turning a piece-of-crap car into a Molotov cocktail hadn’t yet registered in his substandard noggin. It registered with Jake—he stepped backwards another twenty feet, figuring the bulk of the flames would shoot upward and spare him an unexpected barbecuing. The empty parking lot gave them plenty of room to spread out. Hopefully principal Taylor wouldn’t come outside in the next five minutes, although who knows what he was doing alone at school in the first place—probably thinking of new and exciting ways to suspend Jake and any other kid who dared speak his or her mind.
When Jake moved back, Bucky did the same, staying behind the car as he pulled his phone from his back pocket.
“I better not be in the shot,” Jake said.
“You’re not.”
“Seriously, dude, I want to see the video before you put it online or whatever,” Jake thought about pulling out his own phone, to capture the burn from a side angle, and thought better of it. If you do something bad, his eldest brother Kevin always told him, make sure you’re not carrying evidence of it on you. Kevin was a very smart dude.
“I won’t. You’re cool.” Bucky turned his fancy phone on its side, for the widescreen effect.
They waited. The tip of the rag flared and crisped black, the flames bubbling the Buick’s jaundice-yellow paintjob. Jake scanned the parking lot again, his eye drifting to the brick monstrosity of the school looming over it. So far this experience was underwhelming, and he started feeling idiotic about his earlier excitement, when they had first spied the principal’s car parked all by its lonesome.
“It’s just gonna burn like that?” Bucky asked, shaking his phone in frustration, as if that would make the fuel torch faster. “Or is it gonna go off?”
“Like a soft fart so far,” Jake agreed. “Maybe we should—”
The car hood exploded with a belch of smoke and oily fire, baking Jake’s skin, crisping his eyebrows. The blast kicked the Buick backward. Bucky was slow in the head but his reflexes were fine-tuned by a childhood of dodging thrown bottles, and he managed to dive ninety-five percent of his body out of the vehicle’s fiery path. The remaining five percent was his right foot, which crunched like twigs as the Buick’s left-rear tire rolled over it.
Bucky howled and dropped his phone. Jake ran to comfort and assist, his throat tightening like it always did when he freaked out—but he wanted to laugh, too, how messed up was that? The Buick, slowed not a bit by its collision with Bucky’s foot, rolled across the parking lot like a funeral pyre on wheels. Who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor? Who says the cosmic forces out there—or whatever Deity of your upbringing—hadn’t arranged for a construction crew to build that parking lot at a slight gradient sloping toward the front of the school, creating a natural path for two tons of steel and burning plastic to follow? Who says those cosmic forces, gifted with a finely tuned sense of aesthetics, didn’t want to demonstrate their displeasure at the architectural travesty of John Jay Public School?
Jake could only stand there, flabbergasted, as the Buick crashed through the glass doors of the school and proceeded to flambé the front hallway, the ceiling tiles popping in bursts of Halloween orange, the fire alarms shrieking in panic. His best option at that moment was to run, and he even turned on his heel to do so—but Bucky on the ground, mewling in pain, made him stop. As they say in the war movies, you never leave a man behind.
Bucky’s body seemed heavy and soft as a burlap sack stuffed with doughnuts. Jake grunted as he hoisted that weight onto his shoulder, ready to begin the long journey for the woods at the edge of the parking lot, when the school’s side door crashed open and a shirtless Principal Taylor stumbled out, pale and wet as a manatee hoisted from a Florida swamp. Behind him came Rebecca Smith, Jake’s science teacher, also missing her shirt. Jake stopped in his tracks, stunned by this sight of naked adulthood: webbed with veins, saggy with fat, notched with scars and moles and red marks from too-tight clothing: two pieces of animated beef jerky primed for heart attacks and cancer and death and other indignities. Jake suddenly wondered if dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounded.
Taylor caught sight of them, and his mouth opened. His fists balled. He seemed on the verge of unleashing one of his patented tirades, but stopped before a single word came out, because Jake’s grin said he was more than happy to share this story with anyone who’d listen. Taylor returned a tight-lipped glare that suggested he was ready to overlook Bucky and Jake—not to mention the loss of his motor vehicle and considerable damage to his institution—if Jake was willing to disappear and never mention this situation to anyone.
Jake agreed to the deal by turning around, re-hefting the almost-comatose Bucky, and taking off for the woods again. He was ten yards from freedom when the local fire department, breaking its all-time response record by two minutes, came screaming down the school driveway, followed by a police cruiser with its lights flashing. It was only then, as he gently lowered Bucky to the grass and stood tall to take his medicine, that Jake started laughing his head off.
II.
He was still laughing when the cops dragged him into Captain Keegan’s office and shoved him into the world’s most uncomfortable metal chair. Keegan sat behind his monolith of a battered-steel desk and stared at Jake as if the kid were a particularly interesting booger. Keegan was the kind of cop who ordered his officers to blast the “Star Wars” Imperial March from their squad cars patrolling the neighborhoods—nothing intimidating about that, no sir, just your friendly local fascists interfacing with the community.
“You,” he told Jake, “are in such deep crap, it boggles my mind.”
Jake shrugged. “You gonna charge me?”
“Am I going to charge you?” Keegan chuckled without an ember of warmth. “Kid, if it was up to me, I’d drag you out back and shoot you in the back of the head. Try and put an end to that twisted bloodline of yours. But unfortunately, we have things like due process in this country, so yes—alas—we will have to merely charge you for your crimes.”
“Lawyer,” Jake said.
“Why would you need a lawyer?” Keegan squinted as if this were the oddest request he’d ever fielded in his twenty-one years of policing. “Tell me everything now, and I’ll persuade the state to give you a break, as much as I’d hate to do so.”
No way the state would give Jak
e a break. No, the state would ship Jake down to Cremaster Academy, a remedial institution of higher learning known not-so-affectionately by every unlucky student forced to grace its halls as ‘The Ballsack.’ Cremaster’s sadistically avuncular staff forced students to line up in the hallway each morning, pull up their cuffs, and submit to a weapons search. The basketball team’s record stood at 2-59, with those two wins coming from tragicomic matches against a special-needs school downstate. The whole thing was just sad.
“You have no power. District attorney can hear your recommendation and recommend you shove it.” Jake kept his tone perky. “You know it, I know it. Lawyer.”
“You little sociopath.” Keegan grunted. “Your brothers taught you well.”
Jake took issue with the term ‘sociopath.’ If I hadn’t stopped to haul Bucky to safety, he thought, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now. Besides, it’s not like anybody’s ever convicted me of squat, and the last time I checked, here in America, you’re innocent until proven guilty. Anything else is le bullcrap. “Lawyer,” Jake said again, and offered the cop his widest grin, one that reminded Keegan so much of the kid’s father.
III.
Jake’s brother Ernest (“As in Hemingway,” is how he liked to introduce himself. “I’m a serious guy”) swept in like a force of nature an hour later, accompanied by a local lawyer who advertised on bus benches and wore a suit so shiny you could adjust your hair in the reflection. The lawyer spent the next thirty minutes comparing the county government to Judaea under Pilate, and sprinkling his full-throated roars with lots of Latin, before exiting the building with a happy Jake on one side and a dour Ernest on the other.
Ernest waited until the parking lot, and the lawyer’s departure in a battleship of a Cadillac, before he slapped Jake on the back of the head. “You still smell like smoke,” he said.
“Thanks for getting me out,” Jake growled.
Ernest unlocked the doors of his fine muscle car and gestured for Jake to climb inside. They boomed onto the highway at whiplash speeds. “You bored with video games or something?” Ernest asked. “Figured you’d liven things up burning down the school?”
Shotgun Honey Presents: Locked and Loaded (Both Barrels Book 3) Page 19