by Ben Peek
“You won’t hear me defending Stalin. I’ve heard of awful things done in his name.”
“Damn right,” Wayne muttered. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a red and white cigarette packet, and a brown box of matches.
“But,” Welles continued, “but he isn’t to be taken lightly, either. The man does run a country.”
“The man’s a beast.”
“He’s just a man, John.”
“No.” Wayne flicked his match and brought the flame to the end of his cigarette where, after drawing in his first breath, he waved it out. Smoke trailed in a grey, indistinct wisp over Wayne’s sun-browned face, then evaporated. He said, “No, he ain’t. Maybe everyone who follows communism ain’t bad. I’ll allow that. But the face of it nowadays is that of a rabid beast, and the leader of that pack of beasts is Stalin.”
“Still, you should watch yourself—”
“No,” he replied shortly, cutting Welles off. “I know you say it out of friendship, Orson, really I do, but no. You’re wrong. You can’t be no coward ‘bout what you believe, and a man has to say what is right when it is so. Especially men like you and me, since we got louder voices that most other folk. And one of them responsibilities of having that voice is exercising it. That’s the notion this very country is built upon. That’s what democracy is.”
“This democracy is not perfect,” the other replied. “Or are you forgetting that it stole this country from the natives?”
“It’s two different things,” Wayne replied angrily. “We didn’t do anything wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and them Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves. Maybe we weren’t right in the way that we did it, but without us, this land would’ve stayed nothing but mud and tents.”
“It must be lovely to see everything so black and white.”
“So long as you make sure you’re on the white side. Now lets change the subject. I didn’t come out all this way to argue with you.”
They ordered. The food arrived and settled wordlessly. After the waiter had left, and in the dimness of their booth, Wayne tried to warm to his companion; but Welles’ words had dug beneath his sun-browned skin and laid a tiny egg into his mind. No matter how he tried to brush it off, tried to smile that dismissive half smile of his, his thoughts kept returning to the egg and its suggestion that it was true.
After the meal, Wayne and Welles stepped out into the overcast afternoon. The city’s fragile shadows fell over them like thin sticks of crumbling ash. Welles, leaning on his cane, said, “It was a pleasure, John.”
“Yeah, it was nice,” Wayne replied, pulling out his cigarettes.
Welles nodded, motioned to speak again, but stopped.
“What?”
“Remember what I said,” he advised quietly, leaning forward. “A red menace is not to be taken lightly.”
Wayne frowned around his cigarette, but before he could press Welles, the other man shook his hand and left. It was strange, but then Welles was strange. He had been ever since Wayne had first met him—it was a strangeness that resulted in people not wanting to work with the man, despite his talent. Still, it was not Wayne’s problem.
By the time Wayne was on his second cigarette, he was on the Avenue of the Americas and behind three Korean men in identical dark blue suits. Behind him walked two black women, and their conversation, high pitched and full of unnecessary hyperbole, reached over him: one of their children had enrolled in the US Army, and was currently sending them postcards from France, telling them of a world they had never seen. It was beautiful, they said, though it took Wayne a moment to register that he heard she instead of he in relation to their child in the military—a mistake on his part no doubt.
He bumped into the Korean men.
“Sorry there,” he began, the words dying in his throat as the three turned to face him.
Red. The first thing he noticed was the red handkerchief in their pockets; each folded just like the one before it. Then their eyes: dark still pools that reflected his frozen face back at him. With a hesitant step—why was he hesitant?—he tried to croak out his apology, to force it through the sudden chill that ran down his back and caused the Welles egg to crack ever so slightly open.
The middle Korean pointed a long finger at him and spoke sharply in his native language. Around him, the crowd stopped and swelled, bloated with curiosity.
Wayne took a second step back. “There ain’t no need for that kind of language,” he said quietly, holding up his hands in a show of peace. “It was just an accident.”
The Koreans stared at him, their bodies still, their eyes never wavering, that hint of red in their breast pocket never evaporating—that red over their hearts.
“Christ,” he muttered, anxiety rushing through him. He tried to push it away, but couldn’t. The cracks in the Welles egg splintered, the shell parted, and tightness grew in his chest. His palms began to sweat. He glanced around him, but too quickly, and couldn’t make out any of the features about the people around him.
Frantically, Wayne ploughed through the people to his right, bursting out of the flesh ring around him. Free, he stood isolated upon the footpath. Next to him was a large open window belonging to a florist, its display patterned in red, white and purple. The distortion of the final colour registered with a slither up his spine. It wasn’t right. Something was wrong. People flowed around him in tiny isolated droplets, but he remained, he realized, out in the open, where anyone could see him. Anyone.
The thought was ridiculous. More, it was stupid. Wayne knew it. It was utterly stupid, but before he could cast the thought away—as if following some other directive than his own—his gaze followed the rim of his hat up into the grey sky and along the rooftops that were mapped out in a jagged line. Some man could’ve made his way up the stairs. He’d want a fine perch, so he could pick his moment; he’d have to organize it so that there wasn’t a crowd around me, he’d have to make sure that I was suddenly in the open and that his shot wouldn’t be missed.
Nonsense.
Yet he turned in fear.
His gaze ran over the crowd around him, catching a hint of red. The Koreans. They were quiet and still, watching him, stripping back his flesh with their gaze, squeezing the Welles egg and cracking it further . . .
The middle Korean stepped forward and slapped his hands together.
Wayne didn’t wait to see what happened: he fled into a side street, away from the Avenue of the Americas.
As he ran, Wayne’s mind fought to be rational. He pushed together the Welles egg, made the cracks tiny and indistinct, though he could not remove its foul presence entirely.
His run slowed, turned into a striding walk, and a new cigarette burnt away as he tried to orientate himself internally. Externally, he didn’t recognize the narrow and empty street he was on. 43rd? 35th? The sky failed to reveal his position to him: the buildings looming around him were identical to hundreds of others throughout Manhattan.
There was only one difference to the streets he had just run through. It identified itself along the street with a bright splotch of neon red light that ran along the top of the building, spelling out Wal-Mart.
Wayne approached it slowly. A fractured voice in his subconscious questioned the presence of the store. It wasn’t right. Yet, in contradiction to the tiny, isolated thought, the sign remained with its bright electric red and blue beacon. The glass windows were papered in advertisements from the inside, offering chocolate for ninety-nine cents, six rolls of toilet paper for two dollars, bourbon for seven, and an endless run of colourful items that Wayne had never seen before, their prices bursting out in red and yellow.
Dimly aware he was doing it—and without knowing why—Wayne dropped his cigarette to the ground and entered. Inside, the light was bright. So bright that it would have been in competition with the big spo
t lights used on movie sets; but unlike those, which worked with one huge, bright, hot focus, the lights in Wal-Mart ran along the roof and gained strength by reflecting off the white floor and ceiling. It gave the building’s presence a hazy, indistinct quality as if it were constantly shifting in and out of focus until finally it did settle, and a sense of calm settled over Wayne.
Glancing to his left and right, he stared at the clothes on the racks: they were of a design he’d never seen, and made stranger by the fact that the colour had been washed out by the light, leaving what remained to look as if it had been made from watered down paints. Around him a characterless sweet toned murmur of music passed from unseen speaker to speaker in Chinese Whispers.
There was no need for him to be in the store, no reason for him to continue, but he did. The clothes shifted in the cool, artificial whisper of the air conditioning, and soon he came upon aisles of plastic boxes and saucepans and bicycles that looked space age. Food was also offered, and behind him, the entrance to Wal-Mart disappeared in a bright whiteness . . . but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered in the tranquility of the store.
The glass cabinets at the back of Wal-Mart were a beacon for him—it was possible that they had been calling ever since he had walked through the doors, and that their promise was a need that only his subconscious had been aware of and that, only now, he was recognizing.
When Wayne stepped around the corner, leaving the washed out blue and black of car repair kits and the brown of fishing rods behind, a smile unfolded across his face and he stopped. There, he took in the sight of each item in one long drinking glance.
Guns.
There were over fifty, and most were the length of his arm, and ended in polished wooden stocks.
Wayne approached them slowly. The voice of dissent that had raised itself earlier was gone, but it had left a faint tactile impression on his brain, suggesting that this wasn’t right. But what could be wrong? How could it be wrong? The guns, neatly lined up, were soldiers: loyal and steadfast and unquestioning in their proposed service.
“See anything you like?”
Wayne blinked. He had believed he was alone, was sure of it, though he wasn’t quite sure why he had been so confident of the fact. It was a store. Stores had employees, even without customers. Nevertheless, the young man had materialized as if God’s pencil had suddenly sketched him into the world. There was nothing extraordinary about the young man: angular, bony, without muscle, and white. His skin much paler than Wayne’s, and his hair was a short, spiky blonde that had been dyed in a fashion trend that Wayne was unaware of. He was wearing black pants and a blue and red Wal-Mart t-shirt with the name Lincoln printed upon it.
“Sorry to startle you,” the young man said, offering his hand.
Wayne took it: loose and dry. He said, “Don’t worry none about it.”
“Cool.” He retracted his hand. “See anything you like?”
“They all look good,” Wayne replied, his gaze returning to the black metal shafts.
“They’re great for protection—I mean, you’ve got to protect yourself, right?”
Without changing the focus of his gaze, Wayne nodded.
“It’s an increasingly dangerous world out there. It’s not what it used to be in the streets or in the world around us. A lot of people envy the kind of freedom we’ve got. Especially in some of those—in, you know, the black” —he whispered the word and it escaped his lips like a curse— “neighbourhoods.”
“Black?” Wayne repeated, a sour expression crossing his face.
“Yeah, man. You got to watch for them, y’know? They make up around seventy percent of the jail population, most of them in their for armed robbery or murder or—”
“I have no problem with an American,” he interrupted. “Don’t matter their colour.”
“Well, individually, yeah, some of my mates are black,” Lincoln replied quickly. “But that’s individually. As a group—as a group, you’ve got to admit it’s something different. A lot of hate in those people as a group.”
“We ain’t done well by most of them.”
“We’ve been more than fair.”
“No,” Wayne said, the word ringing out with a deep certainty. “We ain’t been fair to them. The key to being an American is freedom—notice my emphasis. We got to make sure it’s for everyone in America, not just those people born the so-called right colour. Black people have the exact same rights as me and you, and not respecting that, that was a thing that we’ve got to deal with, cause we’ve done wrong by them.”
“I didn’t do a thing to them!”
“You’re American, right?”
“Damn straight,” Lincoln shot back. “Proud of it, too.”
“Then you got to accept that this fine country hasn’t always had its finest moments when dealing with some other folks.”
“But—”
“No,” Wayne repeated sternly. “There’s right and wrong, and we did wrong.”
The young clerk stared at him, clearly not pleased. Then, with a slight smile, he ran his hand through his hair and said, “Well, I’m not going to argue with you, man. Never thought I’d hear that in here, though. Next you’ll be saying we should give back the Native Americans their land.”
Wayne shook his head. There was no humour in the situation. “Ain’t been nothing wrong done there, boy, and don’t let me hear you argue it like some folks I know.”
“Course not.”
“Good. Now, I’ve been looking over your guns here, and I reckon I fancy the look of that twelve gauge you’ve got there.”
“The Browning, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s three ninety eight.”
Kinda expensive, Wayne wanted to say, but the price was quite good. What was he thinking? “That’s fine,” he said, finally.
Lincoln pulled the key out of his pants, opened the glass cabinet, and removed the shotgun. Outside the glass, the barrel and wooden stock were darker, as if the entire shotgun had gained an extra weight in reality simply by being placed in Lincoln’s pale hands. Reaching out, Wayne took the weapon into his own grasp as if it were a child. He had been around guns all his life, both real and fake, but there was a rare joy in holding a new gun for the first time, to become acquainted with its texture. He could tell that this shotgun was something special: a rib of the Earth that God had reached deeply into and pulled out.
“Yeah, this’ll do,” Wayne murmured, placing it down on the counter, his fingers never leaving the metal.
“Okay,” Lincoln said, appearing on the other side of the counter. “It’s pretty easy from this point onwards: all I need is two pieces of ID and for you to answer some questions for me. Then, well, then this’ll all be for you.”
Wayne nodded. He opened his wallet and pulled out his driver’s license and credit card, and passed them to Lincoln.
The clerk examined them, nodded, and handed them back. “Okay, that’s fine,” he said. “Now you’ve just got to answer these questions—I’ll just fill in your name and address here at the top.
“Okay,” he said, having finished filling in the details. “First. Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”
“No.”
“Are you, or have you ever been, homosexual?”
“No.”
“Do you regularly wear black?”
“No.”
“Are you black—ah, don’t worry about that. It’s just the next question, sorry.”
Wayne grunted, his displeasure evident. “I don’t like that question, boy. Colour ought to not have anything to do with it.”
“It’s just the question. I don’t write the sheet. Anyhow, you’ve got one left, ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Lincoln took a deep breath, and in a rush said, “Have you ever thought that your Government is lying to you? And that this lie exists to hide the truth ab
out a political system that has ceased to be about democracy, but has become a Capitalist-orientated Government that runs the country not with the needs of the people in mind, but rather with the needs of its investors. These investors being the large companies that support the President during his campaign for office. Furthermore, has it ever occurred to you that this Capitalist Government is promoting a Right Wing Christian view throughout politics and economics on a global scale, which is ensuring that new technologies and theories that exist outside the Capitalist cannon are stunted in their growth?”
“I can honestly say,” Wayne said slowly, “that I ain’t never thought that in my entire life.”
“Great,” the other replied brightly. “I’ll just call, get everything checked, and then, assuming there’s no problems, the gun is yours.”
Wayne waited while the young man called. It took five minutes for him to repeat the information, and another five to wait for conformation, and then he hung up. “Everything is fine,” Lincoln said. “Just got to pay for it.”
“Sure. Credit card is there. Don’t suppose you mind giving me some bullets?”
“Sorry, it’s against store policy.”
“Sure?”
“Yeah, but there’s a K-Mart a block down, and you can get some there.”
“They ain’t going say anything about me bringing in the shotgun, right?”
“Won’t be a problem. You’ve got a receipt.”
The bullets were easily obtained. Wayne placed them in the box next to the twelve Gauge, held both in his right hand and felt, for the first time since leaving Welles, safe. Safe enough that, when he figured out where he was (38th Street), he didn’t hesitate to make his way back towards the Avenue of Americas, a stream of cigarette smoke trailing in smoky-grey victory.
Above him, the sky rumbled with thunder. The fragile shadows that had strained earlier across the ground finally broke and seeped into the concrete, washed away like dirt down a drain. Wayne didn’t quicken his pace. Let it rain! He didn’t care. Nothing bothered him. If it weren’t for the people around him, he might have laughed at the fear he had felt earlier. A fear that did not bother him as he paused at the curb, waiting for the pedestrian light to change, and saw two Middle Eastern men step from a yellow and black checkered taxi.