by Ryan Gattis
It was then that I saw Jimmy, crouched down and looking at me through Bruiser's unmoving legs. Then he smiled, stood up, and sidestepped Bruiser like he was inspecting a statue at an art museum, once around.
"Damn, girl, you took some shots." He was grinning like he was proud of me. It was a Cue-type smile.
"What the hell did you do?" My second question was why didn't you do it sooner? But I didn't ask that one. I tried to push myself to my feet but I failed.
"I just hit the right spots. He'll be alright in a few hours."
"How come he can't talk?"
He could move his eyes though. And they were frantic. Moving back and forth like his face was just a Halloween mask that he had put on and could only just see through the eyeholes. I've never seen Bruiser look so scared.
"I hit that spot too."
I can't lie. There is absolutely nothing sexier than a man who can paralyze someone who is about to dislodge your jaw from your head. Seeing Jimmy in action turned me on. Well, I didn't exactly see him but I saw the results. It was a shame I didn't have any time to dwell on it as he lifted me to my feet and put my arm over his shoulder. Test passed, we had to tell Melinda that her time was running out even faster than I thought. If she didn't know that already.
GETTING BACK
But right before the two of us were going to walk out the building exit of the cafeteria kitchen, I stopped. Something was wrong.
"Jimmy, we can't go out this way." I said it as quietly as I could.
As good as Bruiser was, there was no way he was the only one. I saw a shadow move under the door, a foot. This was pretty close to the sloppiest ambush I'd ever seen.
"Yeah, I know," Jimmy said. "So what now?"
"We got to go out the back, once we get past the trucks, we cut left, take the alley, and you know the way home from there."
More than likely we were surrounded, but if that was the case, whoever it was would bank on us leaving the way we came and not by the trucks because, supposedly, there were a lot of guys out there and none out the front. Fuck them. Trucks it was. Jimmy led and I followed as we ducked down the hall that connected the kitchen to the rear room and its giant pale green refrigerators. Over Jimmy's shoulder, I could see light coming from the outside and the open exit door. But I could also see two Runners, dropping their boxes and coming at us. Jimmy pushed me backward into the hall and I nearly fell over. I hadn't expected it.
You know, it's just never like the movies. All that back and forth and pretty blocking and kicking and drama, you can forget about that shit. When someone as skilled as Jimmy fights an amateur, or worse, a beginner, it's over before a punch is even thrown. Not that they know it. See, by the time I regained my balance and hauled myself up on a wooden cabinet, I caught sight of Jimmy flitting out the exit. I just heard the sound of Cue's old flannel ripple behind him and then he was gone.
Both Runners were paralyzed in his wake: the first one, leaning back like he was going to throw a punch, the second one, actually tipped over on his side, sprawled rigid across the floor as he'd been caught trying to kick. Jimmy must've taken pity on him and set him on his side rather than allowing him to fall. He never would've stayed balanced on one leg like that. Both Runners had the same looks on their faces that Bruiser had. They looked like little boys faced with the terrifying experience of black magic for the first time. I seriously had to get Jimmy to teach me that. I couldn't think of anything more powerful than hitting the right pressure points and getting someone to stop dead but keep breathing. And the fact that he could do the same on different people, of different heights, and that he could do it every time without fail and without killing them boggled my mind.
Couldn't stay boggled for long though because a Runner came out of one of the walk-in freezers with a box. She dropped it and it made a sound like something broke inside. Like THUD-TINKLE. The funny thing was she had a look on her face that basically said, "Oh no! I shouldn't've broken that!" just before she came at me. It was over before it began.
Must've been a new Runner because she led with an awkward left jab and didn't even sell it as her feint at all. I knew she was coming with a leg sweep before she even turned around and bent down, so apart from my hip making it difficult to jump, I cleared her leg and brought my boot down on the side of her head, it ricocheted off the wall, putting her out flat before she even finished turning around. Sad. She hadn't even learned her playbook yet. And here she was expected to defend a huge drug convoy. Poor kid. I just did her and her folks a favor.
"Come on!" Jimmy poked his head back through the exit and the light silhouetted him it was so bright.
I followed the sound of his voice outside but had to stop the moment I got out the door. One, because my eyes needed to adjust to the harsh glow of reflected cloud light, and two, because I couldn't believe what I thought I was seeing. So I propped myself up against the big black cab of the rumbling semi parked in the loading dock as my eyes adjusted and when they finally did, it took everything in me to stop from pulling a 'Fredo and gloating in the stunned faces surrounding me.
To my immediate left, petrified midkick, was Donnie K., Pop of all Runners. His legs must've been at a seventy-five-degree angle and he was actually propped up against the side of the building by his outstretched leg, like he was a mannequin or something that was just being put off to the side to fill a display at a later time. It was seriously a freeze-frame pose out of a dojo ad that gets turned into a logo. No joke. Behind him were a half dozen other Runners caught in various forms of paralysis: one trying to block, another with her front foot forward leaning back, one down on the ground and stuck in a half kick, two or three others caught in various punching forms that never made it to full extension. But there was one I really felt bad for. He was fixed in a position where it was obvious he was turning away with a scared look on his face. He wasn't trying to defend or attack, just trying to run away when he got gripped. The Runners would do a whole lot worse to him than we ever would once they saw the stance he was frozen in.
"Let's go!" Jimmy said, but I didn't want to. I'd never seen anything like it. So many living, breathing people unable to move even though they so desperately wanted to. It was mesmerizing.
Of course, around the back of the truck were even more frozen people, six or seven more easily: some lying down on their sides in the half snow on the ground. There was even a kid inside the truck, holding one of the back doors open and trying to punch with the other fist.
By the time Jimmy grabbed me and walked us out of there, I was completely lost in awe and half frozen myself All I could do was look behind me at all the figures, twisted and stuck into the weird cold shapes of fighting, like action figures on a kid's playroom carpet, lying around a truck that still had its engine running: expelling enough exhaust into the narrow, high-walled loading bay to create an eerie gray smoke around the bodies.
We just did myths in my English class. That feeling I had must've been close to what that one hero felt in Medusa's lair. Everything just being stone, and having a terrible feeling, and I didn't know what was worse: the fact that Jimmy could do something that mind-blowing, that he had that much power, or that I had no idea what Ridley was going to do when he found out. I had the distinct feeling that the Gorgon was lurking somewhere and I knew I wasn't going to be the one to cut off its head.
Back at home, I could hear the ball game on in the living room before I even unlocked the front door. It was a good sign. Once inside, I made sure to shut the door quickly to keep the heat in, and spun around to find Remo watching the ball game with Dad. No Melinda, thank god. I had an ill feeling she might've been at the house waiting for us, shrugged it off.
"Yo!" I screamed it more than I said it, because I still couldn't believe it. I was so excited. "You should've seen this kid fight!"
Both Remo and Dad looked real interested all of a sudden. It was nice and warm inside so I knew Remo must've turned on the oven a while ago.
"I didn't fight," Jimmy said.
That was his story and he was sticking to it.
"What?" I didn't even turn away from my audience. "Hey, he temporarily paralyzed the shit out of at least twenty dudes!"
"Only fourteen," Jimmy said.
"Yeah, outside, plus three inside, that's seventeen. I have no idea how he did it so fast!"
I must've stumbled a little on my own because Remo got up real quick and sat me down on the couch.
"Where'd you get hit?" he asked.
I pointed to my leg and also to my lower back, right on my hip. Dad looked back to the television. It was nothing he hadn't seen before. There'd been much worse. Some bloodstains we couldn't ever get out of the carpet.
"Well, no puncture wound and I can't see anything yet but my guess is you got a nasty bone bruise on that hip. How'd you say you did it?" Remo tugged my shirt back down to its original position after testing the skin underneath a crashing tattooed wave.
"Got flung over a big-ass metal table."
"Yeah, well, you probably hit the corner of it. Ice, ice, ice," he said as he got up and took the trays out of the freezer, grabbed a small plastic bag from underneath the sink, and filled it up with the hard cold stuff then handed it to me.
"Why do I need that when I can just sit outside?" I asked.
Remo handed the ice bag to me, then pried my mouth open to look at the hole where my tooth had been. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jimmy slip into the kitchen and fill the empty trays with water then put them in the freezer. He must've been hungry because he opened the fridge door next. Seeing the light on his face (not too different from the cloudy white day outside, the fluorescence on his nose and forehead, his dry hair), I realized something that caught my breath up in my throat.
He hadn't even broken a sweat the whole time.
WEDNESDAY MORNING
I'd fallen asleep in front of the TV the night before and my ice melted and leaked all over the couch. Woke up around three and tried to avoid the wetness by moving to my bed, but Jimmy was there. I didn't blame him. He still wasn't ready for Cue's room. I wasn't either. So I went back to the couch and tried to soak the water up with a dish towel but basically, it didn't work and I had to sleep with my knees in a wet spot. I tried a bunch of different positions but the couch was too thin and the wetness was unavoidable.
I got up early and took a shower before anyone else in the house woke. Steam took over the mirror and the frosted window before I turned the fan on. It was the only way to heat up the room. Every irrational cell in me wanted to ambush Melinda with a shovel when she showed up at the house in a few hours. But we had to play along like we didn't know the scene in the cafeteria kitchen was an ambush.
Now it was everyone's problem because Jimmy was back. Whether he'd acknowledge it to himself or not, he fought. Would it take much more to bring out the dragon? I straddled the lip of the tub and stepped into the shower. Maybe Melinda was just trying to get rid of me, but why? She'd need me around to survive Ridley's onslaught. Hot water made my hip feel worse. My knee was still pretty stiff too. Thankfully my face was getting better, but I still had trouble chewing thanks to the hole in my gums and my jaw made a new weird popping sound when I moved it up and down. I been hit there a ton of times and it never made that sound before. Great.
After I was dressed, I took Dad his meds and I was real surprised to see him awake, sitting up in bed, and reading a magazine.
"Um, what's up, Dad?" I asked, real calm.
Actually, it kind of freaked me out. I mean, I'd read somewhere that once someone decides to die, they get all peaceful and act different and then the next day, or whenever they decide to do it, they're gone. No hesitation.
"I talked to Remo," he said.
Dad pushed himself toward me and stuck his hand out for the meds. Yeah, maybe he was a bit of an addict, but it was better than him being in withdrawal over the last day or so.
"Yeah? So he just came by out of nowhere?" I asked. I had to give it to Remo. The guy was pretty much the best friend I had in the world right then, helping to take some of the weight off.
"Yeah, he just came by. We talked. I don't know. Figured I was being more of a burden as I was, with the crying and everything. It'll still be tough but I still got some gas left in the tank."
"What'd you talk about?" I was genuinely interested. There was absolutely nothing I could think of that would cause such a change, apart from the suicide thing.
"His mother, but mostly he listened while I talked," Dad said.
Well, maybe Remo talked about what it was like to be a prisoner in your own head. How his mom started over from almost zero every five to eight minutes. Maybe Dad realized he didn't quite have it so bad. He could still think. He was still pretty much himself And though I thought all those things while I checked his back for evidence of his bedsores getting worse, "Oh," was all I said.
"Yup, I'm going to start painting again, mi angelita. Remo's coming by today with some new oils for me and he said he might even be able to snag some canvases too."
I was still in a state of semi-shock when I walked out the front door with Jimmy, hearing Dad's words echoing inside my head. He hadn't done any painting since Mom died and that was over three years ago.
"Jen!" It was Melinda, but her voice sounded far away. "Jen!"
"What?" I asked, and probably at exactly the right time too, because she looked like she was about to start shaking me. Or worse. And if she'd done that then I wouldn't've been responsible for what I did to her. The hand on my shoulder was Jimmy's and he looked a little concerned.
"What the fuck happened yesterday? There're stories going around already." Melinda was pissed off.
I nodded to Mark and Rico at their usual places behind her, but that just made Melinda worse. Her whole face and neck were going red, and maybe she would've hit me if the cops hadn't driven by right then. Real slow, measuring us up. Of course, they had to know something was going down soon.
When they'd left, Melinda said, "I'm only going to ask you one more time—"
I interrupted her, "I don't know what Ridley's planning but we're in trouble. He sent a huge shipment yesterday, just a little later than he thought he would. I guess he was trying to avoid paying the cops their share. Maybe that's why they're on patrol today. Sending a message."
Melinda nodded a "get on with it" type of nod. She was still red and not wearing a hat either. Steam was coming off the top of her head and pushing up into the air. It was freezing out. She probably ran all the way to my front yard.
"I heard him say that there wouldn't be any Grand Championships, that they were going to take care of us before then."
Melinda's face changed when I said it. Couldn't've been a full second, but she was more than surprised. See, the thing that tipped me off was she didn't ask why not. She didn't make me talk more about it. She just turned inward for a second like she was checking it against something she already knew. I'd known her long enough to know that it wasn't her usual run-of-the-mill surprised reaction.
"What else happened?" She was seriously wigging out.
"We got spotted. We had to fight our way out." I said it flat, didn't even look at her when the words came out, just started walking. Everyone kept up.
"So I heard. Supposedly it was a fucking wax museum in there." Melinda looked at Jimmy but something wasn't right with her.
"He didn't fight," I said. I knew Jimmy was going to say it anyway. Denial, justification, whatever. At that point, I really didn't care what he told himself We made it out of there without a trip to the hospital.
"Well, you didn't do it." She was still breathing hard as she walked. I'd be real tempted to say that she had run all the way to my house after all.
"Anything else?"
"That's it," I said.
When he got to school the aura around Jimmy had been magnified by a factor of a thousand. Everyone got out of our way. Some even half ran. I heard later that there were disturbances in his classes because plenty of kids refused to sit next to hi
m. Hadn't they heard? He was el Diablo. It was official. Jimmy Chang = Satan.
Of course, I didn't make it to my first class of the day. Mock was standing outside the door to civics.
"Let's go," was all he said.
"Is Ridley gonna rig up my civics grade too? Can't get a good one if I never get to class." Sometimes I just can't help myself. Bad hip or no bad hip, I could take Mock. He was tall but he was weak. I was taken to Ridley's office. That's right. He actually had an office: an old portable classroom, basically an RV with no wheels dropped out in the parking lot between the tennis courts and the gym. The school stopped using them a few years ago when the student population took a dive, so Ridley moved in. No one complained.
"Melinda sold you out, Miss Jen. She didn't even think twice about it. She agreed to join me if I fulfilled a few requests of hers." Ridley was sitting down at his desk when I entered. The floor sounded hollow under my footsteps as I moved to the chair opposite him. The whole place had the odor of wet cardboard.
"How was my acting though, pretty good? I've been practicing with Freddy. But you knew that. I told you while you were hiding in the pantry." He looked at me and I was sure that he had no soul in there. The eyes were just foam-filled holes painted like pupils.
"You know what the problem is?" he asked.
"Not exactly." I shifted in the small seat so that I could put my leg out and take some pressure off my hip.
"The problem isn't that Freddy is a bad actor, because he's a great actor. See, the problem isn't with him, it's with us, or, at least, people like us. Normal kinds of people. We only see him as 'retarded,' and as nothing else. Did you know he's written fourteen plays?"