Trouble No Man

by Brian Hart

  “We only have one roadblock,” the man says. “Ten minutes and you’ll be able to sit up.”

  “Hang in there,” the woman says.

  “We’re fine,” Cheryl says.

  They slow for the roadblock. Cheryl’s youngest, Oliver, won’t stop talking.

  “He needs to quiet down,” the man says.

  “Oliver, be quiet,” the younger child says. He listens to her.

  The militiamen move into the road and one of them holds up his hand to stop them. The woman gives the militiamen a beauty queen wave and a phony smile.

  “Shit,” she says, still smiling.

  “What’s happening?” Cheryl says.

  “We’re fine,” the man says. “Be quiet and we’ll be out the other side in a minute.” He comes to a stop and rolls down his window.

  “Why don’t you get that goddamn thing out of here?” the man says, points to the scorched SUV.

  The nearest militiaman smiles and approaches with his finger outside the trigger guard. “Serves as a reminder, doesn’t it? What could happen.” He leans in to look in the cab, sees nothing, keeps walking, looks in the back. The man watches in the side mirror as he reaches in the truckbed and comes out with something. He smacks the bed rail twice and the other militiaman steps aside and waves them through.

  “We’re good,” the man says, accelerating.

  “What’d he take?” the woman says.

  “Can we get out?” Marnie says. “My legs hurt.”

  “Come on out, sweetheart,” the woman says. “Come up here with me where there’s room.”

  The girl crawls from beneath the blanket and the woman helps her over the seat into the front seat of the truck. Cheryl lifts Oliver onto her lap and wiggles in between the two girls.

  “That wasn’t bad.” Cheryl says.

  “I’m pretty sure he stole your coffee,” the man says.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cheryl says.

  “Mom,” Marnie says.

  “I don’t even care.”

  Cheryl and her kids stay for three weeks, and when her ex-husband pulls into the driveway in a four-wheel-drive van spray-painted camouflage they aren’t surprised. He isn’t visibly armed, didn’t come looking for a fight. His children are happy to see him. He doesn’t make threats or rage as Cheryl swore he would. He repents. He’s scared. He wants his family with him. Cheryl surprises everyone when she decides that she and her kids will go with him. The ex-husband says they’re being resettled in Chico. He wishes them luck. They never see Cheryl or her children again.

  [21]

  R<35

  XX 001

  They flew out of LA for a three-week tour in Europe. Nessy met them in London, dragged them to a football match, various pubs, and he and Roy and Yano started talking about renting a house, maybe Rasheed and Derik too. They put Tony on it. Find us a house by the beach so we can check out all the beaches. Tony sent them emails with potential listings but they wanted to see them in person before they made a decision.

  On their last day in London, Roy and Rasheed were taking it easy watching Nessy and the boys skate a broken ledge that dropped off into a banked cobblestone wall and runout. It had rained earlier and the cobblestones looked as if they were sweating. Derik slid out and took a heavy slam but got right back up and waited for Brandon to try his frontside disaster for the twentieth time. No luck but Derik switched gears and went for a nosepick instead and stomped it. Everyone watching smacked their boards against the ground like they were broadswords against shields. Nessy kicked toward the bank leisurely and instead of trying anything he just carved up it and popped a little ollie and rolled away.

  “Me and Nessy,” Rasheed said to Roy, “we come from an older civilization than you.”

  “You’re saying California is civilized?” Roy said.

  “New York,” Rasheed said. “Places that have history. There’s never been a war fought in California, not in modern times. Only skirmishes. Mexico.”

  Nessy came around again, this time kicking full tilt into the banked wall, and ollied three feet up to the ledge and locked into a backside 5-0 and reverted on the drop and went through the cobbles switch. A chorus of skateboards hammering on cobblestones.

  Birds passed through the gaps in the buildings. Roy and Rasheed had their boards under their feet, back and forth, click click, click click. Nessy was off his board, talking to some girls by his Land Rover, pointing at the lights on the roof rack and popping his hands open, pow, making the girls smile.

  “We got Old World depth,” Rasheed said. “Irresistible to females.” He smiled, did a seated ollie higher than most people could do standing up.

  “You love California,” Roy said.

  “It’s OK. It ain’t home.” Rasheed looked over his shoulder at the sound of honking horns. “This feels more like home than anyplace in California.”

  “It’s all the same to me,” Roy said, jet-lagged, hungover, numb. “There used to be style and, you know, individuality, but now there’s just marketing. Cities are cities are cities.”

  “Marketing is only a symptom.” Rasheed stood and gave Roy a swat on the shoulder and picked up his board and took a run at the bank and back-tailed it like he was rolling to the Sevey to grab an ice cream bar, smooth as could be.

  Roy had been the same person the whole time, probably used to skate better than he did now, but with the recent advertising push, his image had morphed and slid into a narrow but lucrative slot. He was fine with it. The shoes were hot and the ads were everywhere. His full-pager, face and bare chest covered in his own blood superimposed over him step by step throwing a freeway ollie to nose blunt on an overpass rail, then, like a suicide, grabbing frontside and going over the edge and landing on the banked wall, six or eight feet below, somehow rolling away down the super steep and filthy concrete (a sleeping bum and his pack in the background) carrying way too much speed to enter the flat of the two-laner below, but still hanging on and somehow at the last second making the impossible death ollie over the curb and clearing the sidewalk while he was at it and he was rolling, arms up—Conquistador! Then the Prius hit him and sent him ragdolling out of the frame. So long, canine tooth. Hello, new scars and memory loss, blood and more blood.

  Nobody knew that it had taken him four tries to make it, four hard slams, before he was lucky enough to roll out and get hit by a car. There was a lesson in there, Roy could feel it. He was a salmon swimming against the dam.

  The team manager, Tony, sent him a text saying he could expect a mid-six-figure settlement from the Prius. The shoe-company lawyers were all over it. The woman behind the wheel hadn’t been speeding but she’d rolled right through the light. They were in LA so they’d actually pulled a permit to film that day so she was fucked. She’d lose her license for sure and she might go to jail. The best ad of the decade, hands down, man shit, war eagle, death ride, champion blood orgy. Roy swore he’d buy a Prius with the settlement money, fucking love those cars, so soft and quiet.

  In spite of Rasheed’s complaining, the team eventually rented a big house in Ventura near the beach. It had six bedrooms and a pool and they kept water in it because it was square with no tranny and partying and swimming and bobbing around on an air mattress was sweet. Roy realized, with money, not everything was skateboarding. Very few things were in fact skateboarding. Skateboarding had always been free, one of the things he did because he didn’t have any money, but he didn’t have to just do things that were free anymore. Now he could do whatever he wanted, as long as he killed it every time he skated. There was pressure to succeed and he began to miss the days when he skated broke and unknown, free to kill it or crumble and the only one that had anything to say about it was him.

  Depressed, feeling washed up and done, going through a bit of the mid-lifery, Roy bought a motorcycle from the Triumph dealer in Carlsbad, paid cash, one of the reissue Bonnevilles. Over the next couple of weeks he trolled around YouTube and eBay and put drop bars on it and changed the exhaust, added
rearsets, nixed the stock cluster, and replaced it with thumbnail-size tach and oil-pressure gauges. No speedo. It wasn’t long and he was on the bike more than he was on his skateboard. They said—and it was true—that you didn’t know fear, you hadn’t lived, until you’d white-lined on I-5.

  Rasheed bought a built XS 750 from a bike builder in the Hollywood Hills, all black and bored out with a Dyna and rearsets, fast and throaty, and the two of them took a couple of trips up and down the coast, bedrolls strapped to skateboards, strapped to the back of their seats. Derik couldn’t get a license and had to stay home unless he wanted to ride all Ace and Gary with his cousin. Nessy didn’t even like to drive a car and opted out of the moto adventures, said it wasn’t his thing. Yano won some potato-chip-sponsored contest in Atlanta and bought a first-generation cherried-out CB 750 with the prize money even though his only bike experience was piddling his girlfriend’s Vespa to the beach and back.

  It was March 8 and Rasheed missed a corner on 101, twenty miles from home, washed right through it and went off the edge. He had dinner reservations with his girlfriend that night. Roy wasn’t there but Yano was and he never touched his bike again, left it on the side of the road with his helmet in the dirt and when it was trucked back to the house it just sat there in the garage. Nessy was in Japan and got stuck there during Fukushima and couldn’t get out of the country in time for the funeral.

  In the Tribeca Sheraton Roy watched disaster footage of Japan as he put on his suit and combed his hair. He rode to the cemetery with everyone else in a rented Escalade. Tony was driving. They didn’t listen to music.

  Rasheed’s mom hugged him, and looking at her made Roy cry too. He and Derik hit it hard at the wake and cried like children and both said it should’ve been them and meant it.

  Roy woke up on the floor of his hotel room. He had brand new skate shoes on but they weren’t his. Last he remembered he’d been wearing the dress shoes he’d bought with the suit. He crawled to his feet and went to the window, surveyed the city. Bottle rocket water towers. All those rooftops, blue-tarped AC units and dead garden plots, gathered at the feet of the skyscrapers. He checked his pockets. His wallet was there but it was empty. Two linty Hydrocodone and a roach wrapped in tinfoil. His suit jacket was wadded up by the door and his phone was in it. He replied to Tony’s texts and downed the pills with a Heineken from the minifridge. He drew the blinds and texted Derik and got in the shower. Two more beers when he got out and he was passable. He could eat. Derik was staying at his mom’s. Roy didn’t know how to get there. Tony was at the door.

  Derik didn’t fly back with them, nobody could find him, wouldn’t answer his phone, and everyone was worried, but he called Roy a week later from some secret celebrity rehab center the swoosh sent him to and said he was OK, getting through it. The shoe company rolled out a special signature model in memoriam. Roy couldn’t decide if that was insulting or not. He quit painting DEATH-SAID and DEK8D-SKATES all over everything and rattled out RASHEED LIVES instead.

  [22]

  M<55

  CA 96118

  A flat tire, changed in the roadside dust. No sign of the militiamen or anyone else since he’d left the highway for the backroads. He thought they’d follow him. He’d waited to be sure. He’s in the high country now, cirques and dry lakes, tarns. Mudslides scar the lower hillsides and the mountains above are lunar gray and forest fire black. He wouldn’t be surprised if meteors rained down. Hopeless squared. Far away, against the dull sky, turkey vultures spin like burnt paper above a fire.

  Scrubbing the grease from his hands with a wad of dead grass, he spots three mangy mule deer moving through the drainage below. The dog starts after them but the man calls him back. He can see their ribs and the knobby bend of their spines, hip bones. The buck carries his small rack with a bowed neck and gets tangled in a mess of dead alders and falls down briefly until he fights his way free. The doe look footsore as they leave the buck behind.

  The man shares the last of the salami with the dog. When they finish he snips two more of the staples on the dog’s hip and eases them out with his multitool.

  “Snitches get stitches,” the man says. “Or staples.”

  The dog sniffs at his injuries and gives them a quick cleaning with his tongue.

  They enter city limits, head down, suffering a crosswind, the red sun. Transmission lines and transformers have been removed from the power poles that are still standing. The manhole covers have been stolen and the asphalt is buckled and torn from the steel tracks of crawlers, excavators. The undertaker is gone and he left the front door open but the blinds are closed. He doesn’t stop pedaling. The dog lopes alongside. The biomass generator at the mill has been completely dismantled and taken away. Crows and magpies hop and squawk in the city park and he nearly wrecks trying to see what’s dead.

  The neighbor’s security gate, along with a section of the steel fence and posts and concertina wire, has been heaped across the road. Black shapes in the field so he slows but still doesn’t see any vehicles or people. Nothing happens quickly on the bike, plenty of time to work through what could be waiting for him at the barricade. He doesn’t have an option for going around. He’s only a mile from home. Judging by the pinched bricks of asphalt, it was the same tracked machine that had been used in town. They’ve tagged a few of the posts and the road itself with the word traitor, misspelled once, triater.

  They’ve come and gone. Fifty yards down the long dirt driveway a burnt-down-to-the-steel-wheels pickup leans into a bomb crater. Farther, pieces of what appears to be a blasted-apart ATV litters the field, axle and roll cage, steering column, coiled black suspension spring sticking out of the dirt like a spirochete. If there are bodies he can’t see them. The man had planned to send a message to the girls with the TNK but they will have taken that along with whatever else they could find. The dog tests the wind and head down goes tentatively toward the neighbor’s but the man calls him back.

  “We’re going home,” he says to the dog. “We’re not going there.”

  The dog stops, turns to look back the way they’ve come, then flinches and dips down with all four legs. A ripping sound tears by the man’s ear and the dust jumps in the ditch. A power pole gives up a tangle of creosote splinters. Three shots in quick succession and one of them punches through the trailer fabric with a swack. The dog is already running and the man pedals fast with his head low, directly into the borrow pit and dumps the bike. On his knees, he whistles for the dog. From the ditch they move together into the field and fall into the slit trench, a whole series of which surround the neighbor’s house, serpentine as the stream channels in a marsh.

  The shooting has stopped. They’re in the dirt now, low and safe. The man that dug these trenches said: Options are what you make of them. Force multipliers are essential.

  He crawls forward, careful of booby traps, searching for markers. The dog keeps behind him.

  A shadow darkens his path and he turns with his hands up and waits to be struck or shot but it’s a bird, several birds—vultures—slinging here and there across the sun. He can feel his heart beating in the chromium cobalt of his partial denture. At the fence, he lifts the steel grate and slides under and pulls the dog after him.

  With his head just high enough to see, he searches for the shooter but doesn’t see anyone, knows in advance that he won’t, senses the reticle slide onto his face. Nothing to do but run for it.

  Out of the trench, they cross the dusty pasture to the neighbor’s barn and the man opens the heavy steel door and lets the dog go in first. The door slams loudly behind him. Turncoat scrawled in the rust, painted on the wall. The TNK is gone, empty shelves, not a single battery or power cord. The concrete cool of the barn settles his nerves but they aren’t staying. The dog raises its head and sniffs the air.

  Out the side door, they hide behind the lumber crib and wait. The sun is lost in the haze, pale as a bleach spill, somewhere between noon and dusk. An hour passes and no one comes down the road.
The man half-hitches the dog to the crib post.

  “I don’t want to tie you up but you don’t listen.”

  The man hurries around the corner of the house and stops beside a dusty brick-lined flowerbed with a rusted ornamental harrow as the centerpiece. Sight lines to the road are blocked by the house. No one is about.

  The three larger stones and the antique harrow are shoved aside. He brushes away a layer of dirt and digs his fingers beneath the heavy oaken cover and with effort flips it over to reveal the steel hatch hidden beneath. He crawls on top of the wooden lid to give his knees a rest from the hard ground and pebbles. He knocks gently on the hatch for no reason, to hear the sound. Curtains flapping in the broken windows of the house. Nothing else moves. Then the dog is barking and he turns to see and there’s a gun in his back.

  A man’s voice tells him to stand up. He does as he’s told. The dog’s barking has turned into a howl.

  “Don’t turn around,” the voice says.

  “All right. Take it easy. I’m not armed.”

  “Let’s go, make sure your dog stays tied up.” He marches the man to the lumber crib and watches as he ties a proper knot, then walks him over to one of the two large propane tanks in the yard and makes him sit down.

  “If you think for a minute I was trying to hit you with those shots, you’re fooling yourself.” He’s wearing a two-piece ghillie suit and the composite stock of his Kimber has STT and the three stars and the arrow insignia carved in it. He’s twenty-five or thirty years old, black cropped hair and a sparse beard.

  “You live up the road,” the militiaman says. “I’ve been to your house, the burnt barn.” He glances over his shoulder to the road. “It’s like the Bermuda Triangle down here. People come in and don’t come back.”

  “I came back.”

  “Yeah, where’s your family?”