The One-Eyed Man

by Ron Currie

  The bartender came over, lifted Claire’s empty plate, and asked if I wanted another beer.

  “No, I’m fine,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Claire said as he walked away.

  “He doesn’t seem to have anything against me,” I said.

  “He’s queerer than a three-dollar bill,” Claire said, “and he’s probably never been within a hundred yards of a gun. God knows why he lives here. He should be in Austin.”

  I tapped my fingers on the bar, thinking. “Can I ask you a question?” I said after a minute.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s just that once, not long ago, you were so dedicated to the notion of fame that there was nothing you wouldn’t do to have it. In fact, you stated pretty clearly that celebrity was the only thing that gave life meaning, in your view.”

  “Sure. Back when I was considering ritual suicide in the bulk goods section at Total Foods.”

  “But now that you have a genuine opportunity to be famous, you’re balking.”

  “Did someone drop you on your head when you were a baby?” Claire asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” I said.

  “You didn’t, like, fall off a slide at the playground and land on your noggin? Get whacked in the face with a baseball bat? Nothing?”

  “I got a concussion in junior high,” I said. “I was standing at a urinal in the boys’ room, and this kid named Eddie Mayhew came up and tossed me over his hip, Judo style.”

  Claire swirled the ice in her glass. “That must be it,” she said.

  “I’m afraid I’m not following you.”

  “K.,” she said, suddenly exasperated, “yes, I want to be famous, everyone wants to be famous, everyone thinks fame will solve all their problems and make them whole and I am no different. Yes yes yes. Okay? But I want you to be not dead more than I want to be famous. Is that clear enough for you?”

  “I just don’t think this will be as dangerous as you assume.”

  “A man you don’t know walked up and mimed shooting you in the head this afternoon. A man who in all likelihood will actually be at that rally tomorrow. A rally the sole purpose of which is for people to parade around with loaded semiautomatic weapons.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “But these people have an agenda. One that would not be served by hurting me, or anyone else.”

  Claire, in the midst of a drink of water, nearly spit up on herself. “These people,” she said, reaching for a cocktail napkin to wipe her chin, “don’t occupy reality, K. They live in a paranoid self-defense fantasy. Paranoid being the operative word, when one is discussing firearms.”

  I held a hand up to signal the bartender. He raised his eyebrows in response.

  “I’m probably going to need another beer after all,” I told him.

  Claire put her head down until her chin nearly touched her sternum. She placed both hands down flat on the bar. “What if I told you,” she said, “that if you insist on going to the rally tomorrow, you can go by yourself?”

  “I’m not insisting on anything,” I said. “Insisting isn’t really what I do.”

  “But you’re still planning to go.”

  “That’s what we’re here for,” I said.

  “Then what of it? What if I refuse?”

  “That’s your choice, of course,” I said. “Though I have to wonder why you came here in the first place, if you feel so strongly about it.”

  The bartender arrived with a fresh beer. Claire and I were quiet for a few moments, each of us gazing at the mirror behind the bar. Eighties synth pop played from unseen speakers, at a volume meant merely to protect against silence rather than to entertain.

  “You know, I think I’m finally starting to clue in to something,” Claire said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “This has nothing to do with space-time or the Doppler effect or any of the other nonsense you go on about.”

  “It’s hardly nonsense,” I said. “It’s the most important scientific theory in the history of mankind.”

  Claire stared at me, and beneath her stony expression a great fear roiled like magma, threatening to burst forth. “Have you checked the Vegas odds on you since the last episode aired?”

  “You know I don’t pay attention to those things.”

  “Well maybe you should start,” she said. “Because as of this afternoon, they had you at twelve to one.”

  • • •

  When I woke the next morning I found myself alone in our king bed. At first I thought perhaps Claire had slipped away and left town, but then I spotted a note, written on hotel stationery, on the nightstand.

  Out buying supplies, it read. Brb.

  I rose and threw back the curtains to an angry, imperial brightness: powder blue sky, white-hot sun, and nary a cloud to cast doubt on the preeminence of the greatest nation the world had ever seen. Seven stories below, the lampposts were draped with bunting for the holiday, and here and there stars-and-stripes streamers skittered across the pavement in a scouring wind. I walked away from the window, still squinting, and went into the bathroom. Over the leonine roar of the toilet I heard the hallway door open and latch shut again, and when I emerged I found Claire humming cheerfully as she unpacked her supplies: several old, shriveled limes, a bottle of añejo tequila, and a shot glass it would turn out she’d borrowed from the bar downstairs.

  The alarm clock read seven minutes after seven.

  Claire bounded over to the bathroom doorway and pecked me on the cheek. “Let’s get this party started,” she said.

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. “Do you maybe want some breakfast first?” I asked. “Or else a cup of coffee?”

  “That would no doubt be wise,” she said. “But I figure if it’s going to be Colossally Stupid Day, we might as well get started with the stupid bright and early.”

  “This probably qualifies,” I said, looking again at the booze and accoutrements.

  Claire gazed around the room. “I need a knife for the limes,” she said. She looked at me. “Knife?”

  “Haven’t seen one,” I said. “I doubt there’s anything suitable just lying around in here.”

  Claire opened drawers and closets until she found a letter opener in the desk near the window.

  “You sure you’re not hungry?” I asked.

  “Order room service, if you want,” she said, stabbing the tip of the letter opener into a lime. “I might pick at it.”

  By the time my eggs Chesapeake arrived under a fingerprint-smeared aluminum lid, Claire had just thrown back her fourth shot.

  “When do we have to be down there?” she asked, prodding the eggs with a fork as though they might suddenly spring to life.

  “Anytime, really,” I said. “The parade’s at eleven, and the rally follows immediately afterward. So as long as we’re there by noon.”

  “Maybe we should go early,” Claire said. “Scope it out. Get you some breakfast that’s actually edible.”

  “Last night you didn’t want to go at all,” I said, “and now you want to go early.”

  “A lady,” she said, “reserves the right to change her mind.”

  After I dressed and Claire secreted the tequila in her purse, we walked ten blocks to the Fort Worth Water Gardens, a large public park near Interstate 30 where Cold Dead Fingers and allied parties planned to hold their gathering after the parade. Presumably they’d chosen the Water Gardens because its western border, Houston Street, was also part of the parade route, making reconvening after the festivities easy.

  It was on Houston that we found a place called Diner’s Delight, directly across from the Water Gardens. We lingered in a window booth—I had the impression from the rapidly souring mood of our waitress that the coffee refills I continued to order were not, in her mind, sufficient to justify our continued presence—and watched as the streets outside began to fill with parade-goers.

  If you’ve never been to Texas, or any other place where the pu
rchase, use, upkeep, and discussion of firearms is considered divine mandate rather than mere lifestyle, it will be difficult, probably, to understand what we bore witness to that bright and terrible morning. Nearly everyone on Houston Street had a gun of some kind. A plurality carried rifles—AR15s and AK-47s, of course, but also MP10s and the CT9 (which looked like some piece of advanced alien weaponry from a science fiction film), a handful of World War II–vintage M1 carbines, and at least two Barrett M82s, a sniper rifle capable of blowing a man’s leg clean off at a range of over one mile. Accessories, some of them purely cosmetic and perhaps even coming at the expense of the gun’s performance, were clearly an enthusiastic priority. One gentleman with a placard proclaiming his weapon the “FrankenRifle” carried what had started as a humble AR15, but now bristled with a one-hundred-round ammo drum as well as four additional thirty-round clips, a bayonet, two laser scopes, three red dot sights, a holographic sight with magnifier, three flashlights, a contour camera, and a bipod. This determined feat of customization drew fawning attention in much the same way that a puppy might at a parade in, say, New Hampshire.

  Clothing and regalia suggested a patriotism as facile as it was rabid. Lots of red, white, and blue in an endless variety of presentations, from the common (Tshirts and hats), to the somewhat less expected (bikinis, chenille skirts), to the downright bizarre (one man of indeterminate but likely young age wore a second skin bodysuit of red and white stripes, capped off by a blue codpiece festooned with stars). And then there were the flags. Every third person seemed to carry one. We saw plenty of standard-issue Old Glorys, to be sure, but these were outnumbered roughly three to one by the Betsy Ross variant, with a circle of thirteen stars in the upper left quadrant (inside this circle the manufacturer had helpfully printed the number “76,” lest anyone miss the blisteringly obvious reference to the Revolutionary War and, by extension, the Founding Fathers these people fetishized and misunderstood in equal measure). There were plenty of Gadsden flags, as well, with its banana-yellow background and rattlesnake, coiled petulantly and looking more like it’s about to sneeze than strike. A banner with the image of a cannon and the words COME AND TAKE IT was also popular, being as it was a reference to Texas’s revolution against and independence from Mexico. And finally, mixed in with all the other flags was the standard of the Cold Dead Fingers gun club, a pair of M16s crossed at the barrels against an off-white background, with the letters CDF centered above.

  Half an hour after police blocked Houston Street to traffic the crowd had already swelled five and six deep on the sidewalks. Within our range of sight from the window booth there were at least three hundred firearms visible. Black plastic and custom chrome finishes gleamed under a biblical sun. People sweated and smiled and craned their necks to see if anything resembling a parade was yet approaching. They waved to friends. They fondled and massaged their weapons. They hoisted children onto their shoulders and handed them tiny flags to wave as the sound of marching bands and fire truck Klaxons gathered in the distance.

  “I hate them,” Claire said. She stared through the window, her eyebrows raised in the perpetually surprised expression of the deeply inebriated. “The things they care about are so stupid. And they’re so proud of them. Their stupid guns. Their stupid fat kids. Their stupid hot-as-fuck bumpkin state.”

  We didn’t realize the waitress was standing there until we heard her speak. “They probably ain’t all that fond of you, either, sweetheart,” she said.

  Both Claire and I turned to face the waitress. She gazed down at us, her expression even more openly disdainful than it had been in our interactions to that point.

  “I think it’s time for you two to settle up and come with me,” the waitress said.

  Claire turned in the booth to face the waitress. “I think,” she said, “that you can just keep slinging coffee. We’ll decide when we’re ready to leave, thanks very much.”

  I leaned forward and pulled my wallet from my back pocket. “If we could just get the check,” I said.

  The waitress ignored me. She squared up to Claire and planted her hands on her hips. “Who exactly,” she asked, “do you think you’re talking to?”

  “Forty ought to do it, yes?” I asked. I placed two twenties on the cracked Formica tabletop. “Here you are. That ought to be more than enough, I think, to cover one egg special and several coffees. That’s an extremely good tip, right there.”

  Claire got to her feet. Her hips pushed the table several inches over to my side, pinning me in the booth. “I’m talking,” she said, “to the cracker-ass hag standing right. In front. Of me.” She punctuated these last words with three firm jabs of her index finger into the waitress’s sternum.

  Claire was, as always, impressive in her anger, but the waitress, a Texan through and through, turned out to be no shrinking violet herself. In an instant the two of them were on the floor, flailing at one another and spitting like angry cobras. Neither asked quarter, and neither gave any, but donations did include a swatch of hair, several teaspoons of blood, the crown from someone’s molar, a gold nugget glinting on the carpet among several pieces of flatware, and the shards of a broken coffee mug.

  The match was, at first, quite even, but then the waitress tired, began to huff instead of hiss, her movements suddenly in slow motion, and Claire achieved what wrestlers call a full mount: sitting on the woman’s chest, knees on the floor to either side. She rained down punches, her fists landing with dull thuds against the waitress’s face. Two men in soiled aprons arrived from the kitchen just as it was about to get truly bad for their colleague, peeling Claire off and tossing her to the floor.

  One of the cooks, older and significantly more corpulent than his partner, pointed to Claire, then to me. “Both y’all stay where you are. Robbie, go call the police.”

  “No,” the waitress said. She pulled herself into a sitting position on the floor, brushed her hair back with both hands, and felt at a spot below her left eye, where a welt was already starting to rise. “No cops.”

  “Raylene,” the fat cook said. “Wait until you see your face. You’ll call them yourself.”

  Robbie, tall and wide-eyed and likely afflicted by some mental blight, stood frozen between Raylene and the fat cook, two poles of equal influence in his world.

  Raylene got slowly to her feet and glared at Claire, who now stood beside me. “Look at them,” she said to the fat cook.

  He did as instructed. “So?” he said.

  “No, really look at them.”

  Scowling in confusion, the fat cook turned his gaze to us again. After a few moments, recognition dawned.

  “No shit,” he said.

  “Yep,” Raylene said.

  “Robbie, call the cops on his Yankee ass,” the fat cook said.

  I pointed to the crown on the floor. “Does anyone know who that belongs to?”

  “It’s mine, asshole,” the waitress said. “Shut your mouth. Robbie, you ain’t calling no one.”

  Robbie, who’d taken several tentative steps toward the kitchen, froze once more.

  “I don’t get this, Raylene,” the fat cook said.

  But Raylene ignored him, instead focusing her attention on me. “What the hell are you thinking, coming down here?” she asked. “You got a death wish or something?”

  To my left, Claire, investigating a cut on her lip with the tip of her tongue, nodded vigorously.

  “There is growing consensus,” I told Raylene, “that that is the case.”

  “Well that must in actual fact be the case,” Raylene said. “Because there’s no way you’re getting through that crowd without someone taking a shot at you.”

  Raylene led us back to the kitchen.

  “Now what?” the fat cook asked, arms folded over his pony-keg belly.

  “I don’t know,” Raylene said. “Have ’em organize dry storage or something. Just keep ’em back here until the parade’s over.”

  “Isn’t this, like, kidnappin’?” Robbie asked.

>   “I don’t like this at all, Raylene,” the fat cook said. “They want to come down here and shoot their little show, have fun with all the rednecks? Let ’em take their chances.”

  “They may be too stupid to know what’s best for them,” Raylene said, “but that doesn’t mean I have to pretend I am, too.”

  Just then, my phone vibrated in my hip pocket. I pulled it out and saw Theodore was calling.

  “I should probably take this,” I said to Raylene.

  She dismissed me with a brusque wave.

  I walked over to the dishwashing station. “Hello,” I said.

  “My dear, are you alright?” Theodore asked.

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Well, Claire has a cut on her lip. But we’re fine otherwise.”

  “Because the Russians just called and told me you’ve disappeared. As in vanished. Whereupon I reminded them that I was paying an obscene amount of money to prevent exactly that sort of thing from happening.”

  “Tell them we’ve been taken into the kitchen of the Diner’s Delight.”

  “What?”

  “For our safety,” I assured him.

  “Yes, well,” Theodore said, “it sounds as though you’re in the middle of a war zone, according to the Russians.”

  “There are a lot of people carrying weapons,” I said. “But it’s peaceful.”

  “They have also informed me that current circumstances in Fort Worth are such that it constitutes breach of contract on my part, and their final and terminating obligation under said contract was to inform me the two of you had been sitting in a restaurant, and then disappeared.”

  “I have to wonder just how good these men are at their job,” I said, “if moving from the dining room to the kitchen constitutes ‘disappeared’ in their book.”

  “So I want you to inform me the precise moment you leave this Diner’s Delight,” Theodore said. “Which sounds horrid, by the way.”

  “The coffee’s quite good,” I told him.

  “And I want you to go straight from there to the airport. Where we will get you on the very next flight to anywhere, and you will never set foot in Fort Worth again.”