The Coward

by Jarred McGinnis

  ‘Go get your rubber-band guns.’

  I did.

  We loaded.

  ‘Now we are ready to hunt the most dangerous game,’ he said and walked back into the house.

  ‘Armageddon!’ he shouted. He jumped into the garage, gave another war cry of ‘Armageddon!’ and fired his gun. The rubber band snapped me in the shoulder.

  ‘Oww,’ I said, but it didn’t really hurt.

  ‘Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .’ he counted while stretching another rubber band.

  I shot at him as he bolted from the doorway.

  We ran around the house, shouting ‘Armageddon!’ before each shot. We knocked over framed pictures, bumped into shelves. We hid behind furniture and ambushed each other.

  When he put me to bed that night my cheeks were sore from smiling.

  11

  ‘You want a sandwich or something?’ I asked as I wheeled past Jack sitting at the kitchen table, going over a store’s receipt.

  ‘A ham and mustard, please.’

  ‘Thanks for going to the art shop for me. You want to see the watercolour I did?’

  ‘There was a girl there with her ears stretched out like she was an Amazon tribesman. Why would you do that to your own head?’ Jack opened the watercolour pad. ‘This is good. How’s your orchid doing? Do you remember the name?’

  ‘Jack, the grumpy moth orchid,’ I said, spreading the mustard.

  ‘The real name.’ ‘Jack, the grumpy Phalaenopsis Aphrodite.’

  He nodded, impressed. ‘Bonus points for the species.’

  He took a bite of his sandwich, hummed appreciatively as he chewed. I pulled the watercolour toward me. The green looked too washed out.

  ‘Good news.’ I pulled the denial letter from my sketch pad. ‘According to Social Security, I’m not disabled.’

  Jack said, ‘You’ll always be special to me.’ He read the single sheet of paper and looked at its reverse side. ‘That’s it? They don’t say why they think you aren’t eligible any more. Jesus Christ. I thought you said that woman at the hospital had this all figured out.’

  ‘I tried to call her and the social security office but couldn’t get hold of anyone.’

  Jack’s voice rose. ‘That’s just great. Great.’

  ‘Don’t get pissed off at me. I can’t get much more disabled.’

  Jack looked from the paper to the corner of the room.

  ‘It’s fine. We’ll figure it out.’ He set it down. The back door slammed. I took the rest of his sandwich and threw it in the trash.

  All our afternoon walks started with Jack helping me over the gutter. That tiny, shallow insignificance that toddlers and the elderly stepped over without a thought was impossible for me to manage alone. I had hitchhiked across the country back and forth a hundred times, jumping trains a hundred more times. One wheelchair later and I couldn’t leave the driveway by myself.

  I jerked the chair back and balanced on its large back wheels. It was a satisfying feeling as if my body was weightless, untethered from earth, floating inches above it. My arms held me and the chair at a point of equilibrium. I felt the glee of a toddler at his first steps. Inch by inch, I pushed the chair toward the gutter. A small acceleration as the back wheels went down the slope. At the vertex, I shifted my weight again and returned the front wheels to the ground. I smiled, genuinely pleased at my victory. Small wars deserve donuts.

  ‘Where’s your old man?’ Mr. Do-nut asked.

  ‘He’s on his way,’ I lied. ‘Can you spot me a glazed until the old dude gets here?’

  I ate my donut and thought of nothing. Children zipped past the window dressed in their Tae Kwon Do gis.

  ‘Can you tell me when you wander off?’ Jack said as he entered the shop. ‘Don’t worry about the bills. We’ll figure something out. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘It is. It is absolutely my fault. You were fine until I came back. The last thing you said to me, the last time you saw me, you said that I’ll always be a fuck-up. I never forgot that.’

  Mr. Do-nut hailed Jack from behind the counter. ‘The usual?’

  Jack straightened up. His expression smoothed to a friendly smile. He called back, ‘Thank you, sir. Coffee for this one too.’

  After Mr. Do-nut delivered two plain glazed on a paper plate and two black coffees, Jack said, his voice low, his expression regretful. ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘No. You were right. Now look. You don’t get more fucked up than this.’ I slapped the wheelchair. ‘Which is fine. I deserve it, but you shouldn’t have to put up with it.’

  ‘Good, bad, it isn’t ever about deserve.’

  ‘I know they have homes for people like me. I’ll get my social security back. See if welfare will pay to put me in one of those.’

  ‘If that’s what you want, Jarred, that’s what we’ll do. But I’d rather have you home.’

  We drank our coffees. The silent tv hung above us showing cable news. I picked apart my Styrofoam cup and created a mosaic on the table.

  ‘When I was trying to sober up, I started growing orchids. At first, it was just about making the hours not drinking disappear. You remember Thomas? He was into orchids and got me started.’

  ‘You don’t believe that, do you?’ I dropped my eyes back to tearing my cup.

  ‘Believe what?’ Jack finished the last of a donut and the remainder of his coffee.

  I edged a Styrofoam piece into place with my finger. ‘I don’t remember it so neat and tidy. You used to hide out in your greenhouse to drink and get away from me.’ I brushed the pieces into my hand then dropped them into the remainder of the cup. ‘You grew orchids long before you got sober.’

  ‘No.’ Jack shook his head, but I could see memories were coming back.

  ‘Once after you gave me a black eye, I blew up your greenhouse with a garbage bag filled with acetylene. The explosion blew out my eardrums and burned off my eyebrows. My ears still ring.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jack said. ‘The past is the story we tell ourselves to get through today.’

  Mr. Do-nut was in the back moving trays to a cooling rack.

  ‘Is that some AA fortune-cookie wisdom?’ I went back to tearing at the cup.

  Jack took a drink, but the cup was empty. He looked at the bottom and frowned. ‘Maybe, but that doesn’t make it wrong,’ he said and went for a refill.

  He returned, talking as he sat. ‘When you were little . . . Really little. Maybe three. We were by the ocean, the three of us. Patrick must have been in college. I told you over and over again to stay away from the seawall. But you were a shithead, even back then. Still you went back to the edge, throwing stones or something.

  ‘I yelled at you to stay away from the water. You looked at me. You said, “If I fall, will you save me?” I said, “We should be so lucky.” You looked at me funny. I could see your little brain trying to work out my meaning. Then you tottered off to get more rocks and stand by the seawall and throw them in.’

  ‘Did I fall in?’

  ‘No, of course not. But I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it. When you’re a parent sometimes you say shit you don’t mean. Kids are exhausting, but I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is that what you want to apologise for? Because I can think of other things.’

  ‘I’m sure you can. Jarred, goddamn it,’ he said without anger. ‘Quit picking old fights. Right now, I need you to let me say what I need to say.’

  I nodded then returned my attention to my cup. I felt his eyes on me, but I stayed focused on tearing up pieces of Styrofoam and putting them in the remains of the cup.

  ‘I called the cops a few times. I filled out the missing juvenile forms. No one cares about some drunk and his delinquent son. They said there was nothing they could do until you broke the law.’

  ‘They never waited long,’ I said.

  ‘But, to be honest, near the end, I let you run off. It wasn’t like you were ruining your chances at a Harvard scholarship or anything. I let yo
u run away, because I wanted you to run away. And you know why? Because another year in that house, holed up in my room, wondering what the crap you were going to do to spite me next, another day of that and I might have gone back to drinking. I wasn’t strong enough to be a good father and a good husband. When you have kids, you’ll understand better. Being a parent means always being wrong, no matter what you do. I was ready for it to be someone else’s fault for a change.’

  Mr. Do-nut was in the very back of the shop. He was standing at an industrial sink and staring at the wall. His hands rested on the corners of the stainless-steel tub.

  Jack followed my eyes.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably thinking the same thing we’re all thinking.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘What now, what now,’ Jack said, ‘C’mon. Men who stare at walls are best left alone. Let’s take the long way home now that you’re a world traveller.’

  12

  A magnet in the shape of a frog held a ten-dollar bill to the fridge. Some weeks instead of lunch money it was a case of Capri-Sun, variety packs of potato chips and Little Debbies with a note ‘For the week. Make it last’. One week it was a hundred-dollar bill that got me an accusation of theft by the lunch lady and a confused phone call from a teacher where Dad’s slurred shouts blasted from the receiver. On occasion Monday’s lunch money for the week appeared Tuesday or Wednesday.

  I took the money, packed my schoolbooks and waited for the bus. As we left our neighbourhood, I pretended that Mom was an acrobat running beside the bus. She did double, triple, quadruple somersaults over cars and buildings. Swinging on a lamppost, her white jumpsuit with its red stripe looked like a pinwheel. In her path, my father was shambling back from the 7-Eleven with a case of beer, already drinking one. She cleared the shameful figure with an effortless hop and cartwheeled through the intersection to keep up with the bus.

  13

  I dug around the junk drawer in the kitchen looking for something to write with. There was a box of matches, which I took, which made me think about cigarettes and having at twenty-six to ask my father if I could borrow money for smokes. That was too much reality for this early in the day. I found a metal pen with surprising heft. It was a freebie from Patrick’s business. ‘McGinnis Properties’ written in a fancy John Hancock script. I wrote ‘Jack. Going to take a walk. Jarred’. I thought about the sentence. Take a walk. What else do you write? I crumpled the paper and went to find Jack in his greenhouse.

  ‘Jack, I’m going out for a bit.’

  He said, ‘It’s almost two. If you wait until I clean up, I’ll go with you.’

  ‘I kind of want to be by myself.’ There was worry on his face. He was trying to calculate the right thing to say. ‘Calm your old balls,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine. I won’t get far on foot.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ he chuckled. ‘You need some money?’ Before I could answer, Jack fished out his wallet from his back pocket and handed me a soil-smudged twenty.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I crossed the gutter at the end of the driveway a little more easily this time. Left was how we went to Mr. Do-nut. I went right. There was a grocery store at the end of the neighbourhood, and I could get smokes. I pushed myself along the street. This was the first time since the accident that I had been alone. Before the accident, I preferred solitude. Now, with the chair, being alone scared me.

  At the crosswalk the zipping traffic made me flinch. I hated myself for the cowardice as I waited for the light to change from DON’T WALK to WALK. My palms were sweaty. I looked left, right, left, right, scared that at any moment a car was going to slam into me. With every push across the intersection, panic fluttered in my chest. When I reached the other side, I had to wait for a few seconds for my hands to stop shaking enough so that I could continue pushing my wheels.

  In the grocery store, I went up and down the aisles from produce to dairy with no real purpose. It had been so long since I had been shopping that it felt novel. A teenager in the store’s uniform stopped stacking cans of tomato soup as I passed by.

  ‘Hello, sir. Can I help you with anything today?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘Okay. Let me know if there’s anything you can’t reach,’ he said as I continued down the aisle.

  In the meat section, I manoeuvred to try to lift a ham into my lap. Before I could, another teenage employee, a girl this time, appeared, her ponytail swinging behind her.

  ‘I can bring that up to the front for you, sir.’ She reached to take the ham from me.

  ‘I got it. Thanks.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You sure, sir? Okay. Have a nice day,’ she said and bounced away.

  I was stopped once more before I decided to leave. At the service counter, I was carded for the cigarettes. I showed him my ID.

  ‘Are you here by yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said testily.

  ‘Was it a car accident?’

  ‘Really?’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘The ham too?’ he said, pointing at my lap.

  ‘No, this is my ham. There are many like it, but this one is mine.’ I slapped the meat.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ He took my money and gave me my change and the cigarettes. ‘Have a nice day.’

  ‘You too,’ I said, moving away, the weight of the ham making it difficult.

  I sat outside the grocery store and had a cigarette. Shoppers went in and out, and nicotine reverie tugged my thoughts along. I wasn’t ready to go back to the house. Across the street from the grocery store, there was a 1950s gas station and garage that had been converted into a coffee shop called the Filling Station. Inside it had everything expected of a coffee shop: raw wood tables, exposed brick and a roasting ‘philosophy’ chalked on a large piece of slate. Above the tables, bromeliads hung instead of light bulbs at the end of electrical fixtures. Some had turned upwards to form red-leafed Js.

  The barista was about my age. She was singing along to the music and wiping down the coffee machine. She was pale. She was red-haired. Her t-shirt read ‘sexy senior citizen’ in tiny letters. When she turned, I noticed that her belt had missed one of its loops in the back.

  She greeted me with: ‘Nice ham. What would you like?’

  ‘Black coffee for me and Señor Jamon here will have a water.’

  I picked a table with a view of the counter. I set my ham in the chair next to me and drank my coffee.

  Jack came out of the garage when he heard the front door.

  ‘Hey, how’d your first solo flight go?’

  I held out the meat to Jack. ‘It was pork and gimp day. Bring a cripple, get a ham. What luck, huh?’

  He took it from me and put it in the fridge without comment. I lay on the couch. The locking of brakes, the positioning of the feet on the floor, the transfer over, the pulling the legs up one by one, had become automatic.

  Jack came back with a letter in his hand and sat in his favourite chair. My stomach turned as I tried to guess what kind of letter.

  ‘You promise not to freak out on me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Freaking out is my thing.’ I tried to stay calm, shifting so that I was lying on my side and I could see him better. My knees clunked together and there was a flash of electric fire from my damaged nerves.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Jack said.

  ‘However, I did meet the love of my life today. So now is the time for bad news.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Jack nodded. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Very good. Fingers crossed she has a thing for men and aluminum. Hit me. What’s in the letter?’

  I stretched my arm out and Jack handed it to me.

  ‘A gentleman by the name of Farooq Al-Thani, or more exactly Mr. Al-Thani’s lawyer, writes to say that he is performing an asset search and is asking me for my home insurance policy details.’

  I clenched my jaw so hard m
y teeth hurt. The letter mentioned Melissa’s death, my responsibility and referred to civil case law as if quoting Bible verses.

  ‘That car should have killed me too.’

  ‘I got two things: doodley and squat. He can have them both. Listen to me, I’m not worried about it. I’m worried about you.’

  ‘I think I’m done for the day. I’m going to bed.’

  14

  I went most often to the Filling Station coffee shop. At the time, I convinced myself it was because it had a wheelchair-accessible toilet and was mostly empty save for the businesspeople popping out of their idling cars for to-go lattes. Of course, it was to be around the barista and the hope for our occasional customer–employee chitchat. It was also good to be away from the house and the muddle of Past Jack, Present Jack, and the confusion of whether I resented him, was angry with him or wanted to beg his forgiveness. I stayed away to give him a break from the black spot of me moving through his house, eating his food, leaving wheel marks on the floor and walls.

  Shortly after I arrived, an old woman entered the coffee shop. She struggled with the weight of the door then shuffled to a table nearby. Her head was bowed by the weight of a red knit cap. The barista brought her a coffee and biscotti. The old woman cooed with excitement.

  ‘On the house,’ the barista said to the old woman and winked at me as she slalomed between the tables and back behind the counter.

  I sketched the old woman on a napkin. Her magnified blue eyes swam behind thick lenses as she leaned forward to blow on her coffee. Her whole being was focused on her tremoring hands and not spilling. Tipping the cup to her lips, her eyes widened in pleasured surprise at each sip. A bolt of eyebrow and a gleeful rubbing of the hands followed each bite of biscotti.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ a voice said from behind, surprising me. The barista was pointing at my sketch.

  ‘She’s adorable,’ I said as an explanation.

  ‘Can I show her?’

  I shrugged. ‘She can have it if she wants it.’

  ‘Trudy,’ she called.

  The old woman pulled the picture to her nose. ‘Very nice,’ she said, and returned to her coffee.