“Me? No! Of course not. I don’t go to places like that. I would never—”
“What about Shaun?”
“Shaun? I don’t know about Shaun. I told you I don’t have anything to do with him anymore.”
“Well, maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Somebody did it. Somebody got to pay for it. Might as well be you.”
“But it wasn’t me. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him. And that thing at that party, that was five years ago. Doesn’t have anything to do with now. Look at me, Gerard. I’m telling you I’ve changed.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you. I haven’t.” Gerard shook his head. “Why do you think I just told you all of that, about what my cousin used to say to me? I think he was right, I think I may have stunted my own growth somehow. Because I’m sitting here, listening to you talk about how you’ve changed, and how long ago that party was, and how I have no business being upset about it now. And I got to tell you: I don’t understand a word of it.”
“Don’t do this, Gerard. Please—”
“I know. Pitiful, huh?”
They didn’t even realize they had run a red light until the car braked suddenly and they lurched forward in unison. A station wagon roared through the intersection, the man in the driver’s seat mouthing curses while two girls stared with their mouths curved into startled Ohs! and their palms pressed against the glass of the rear window. Cedric swerved to avoid hitting them and ran into a telephone pole. There was a loud crash and a hubcap popped off and rolled into the street. For a moment, the car sat stranded on the sidewalk, blanketed by a cloud of smoke kicked up by screeching brakes.
Cedric struggled to lift his head. He could feel blood gushing from his nose, spilling into his open mouth. When he opened his eyes, Gerard was still sitting next to him, a nasty gash on his forehead. There was blood running down the side of his face, spilling onto the front of his shirt. He looked like someone had just beaten the shit out of him. But he was still holding the gun.
“Now let’s go see Shaun,” Gerard said.
MARKED
by Gale Massey
Pinellas Park
Callie stood at home plate in the first inning of the game, hoping for the right pitch, when she heard the crash. A breeze rustled the palm trees out past the left field fence. Overhead the sunset had turned the sky purple. The crowd in the bleachers fell silent waiting for the metal-against-metal screech to stop, but it went on so long that everyone knew it had been deadly. The dugout emptied onto the field, the players and coaches stood facing south where the train crossed Park Boulevard, even though that intersection was a quarter mile away and blocked from view by city hall and none of them could see a thing. Pinellas Park had been built after the railroad, and the tracks ran through the small town at a foolish angle. Callie rested the bat on her shoulder and scrunched up her face, but that thing people talk about, how you know in your gut someone close to you has died? That part never happened. After the game resumed the lights on the field came on, she swung at a fast ball, and was out. By the last inning her granddad had arrived to tell her the news.
It never dawned on her that her parents might’ve been in that car. They had said they wanted a few minutes alone and dropped her off at the field promising to be right back. It seemed they were always trying to get a few minutes alone, a thing she doesn’t understand even now, two years later. The three of them were always happy enough, riding in the pickup with Callie squeezed between them, her father’s arm stretched behind her back, playing with a lock of her mother’s hair.
Burial expenses wiped out the equity on their small cinder-block house, so it went back to the bank. Her granddad, the town’s widowed preacher, insisted on a four-foot-tall family headstone, had it installed beneath the ancient moss-draped oak at the grave of his long-dead wife, and bought two silk-lined mahogany caskets. Nothing less, he claimed, would serve the memory of his son. Callie saw the reasoning there, but when Granddad paid for three plots, one for each of her parents and one for himself, it bothered her. The old man explained that when she grew up she’d have a husband, and when she died she’d have to be buried next to him, but it was a man and a situation Callie already knew would never exist.
On the day of the funeral the crowded church was sweltering beneath the Florida sun. Halfway through delivering his son’s eulogy, her granddad had a stroke that nearly killed him. He never walked again and soon his ability to speak vanished. He went into the retirement home two blocks from the high school, and Callie went into a foster care group home. But in a town that was Little League crazy, the half-grown girl never got noticed by families looking to adopt.
The sudden upheaval in her life was a shock, though a well-meaning counselor at family services stepped in to teach her how to manage the anxiety that consumed her. The better help came from a large bottle of small blue pills that the house manager gave her at intervals throughout the day and whenever she asked for another. The pills helped her breathe on bad days. On other days they kept her from biting her nails to the quick. The first year after the train wreck passed without lodging itself in her memory. She went through the motions of brushing her teeth and eating, but her mind was always at home plate, the bat resting on her shoulder, listening to the screeching metal.
With help from the pills two years crept by so slowly that her memory seemed like a movie about some other girl and some other family. After another year Callie couldn’t trace herself back to a moment when she wasn’t sliding toward panic. Approaching a window caused a small jolt of adrenaline to burst in her stomach. A door could leave her paralyzed. The house manager kept an eye on her, took her shopping sometimes at the Dollar Store at the strip mall in town just for the distraction of stocking up on household goods. Callie hated shopping. The store added dimension to the world when what she craved was something that would make it smaller. Shelf after shelf of canned and boxed food. Where did it all come from? Who had touched it? Had they washed their hands? Everyone knew about tampering, how it happened all the time.
Opening jars was the worst. Wondering what some stranger might have put in the applesauce or toothpaste. Anything could be tainted, especially products from the Dollar Store where the poor people shopped, yet the house manager refused to waste money across town at the more expensive Winn-Dixie. Callie stayed awake at night worrying that the food from supper had been contaminated by a disgruntled worker on a production line, amused at the thought of killing a stranger on the other side of the country. Callie took to slitting the tube to get the toothpaste out of the bottom. She’d use it a few times and throw it out, count herself lucky each time she survived. Eventually she stopped using it altogether because the counselor told her it was good to trust her intuition, and her intuition made her suspicious of Dollar Store toothpaste.
On the really bad days, when even four pills didn’t help, she used matches. She kept a pack with her because some days just holding the matchbook was enough, on other days the smell of sulfur was enough. On really, really bad days she had to feel the burn. The burn turned her mind white. It told her she was strong and had nothing to hide from because in the middle of a burn the only choice was to endure.
A girl at school had asked if she wanted to see a match burn twice and Callie had been intrigued. The girl struck the match, blew it out, and touched it to Callie’s arm. She screamed as white light exploded behind her eyes.
The girl laughed and said, “Make your mark or the world will make it on you.”
Callie saw her point. Right then she decided to make her own marks—a strip of burn scars down the inside of her arm.
The burn hit the back of her head first and wiped her mind clean. Nothing else existed while her head was lit up like that. The counselor noticed the scars. She made a note on Callie’s chart and suggested she trade softball for basketball. The next day a new prescription showed up and was added to her morning medication. Callie studied the new pill. It was solid and harder to swallo
w and sometimes got lodged sideways in her throat and hurt until it dissolved.
Basketball was no more fun than softball. She couldn’t run and dribble at the same time, she always got turned around on the floor and ran to the wrong net, but she was taller than the other girls and able to snag rebounds over their heads. The coach told her to plant herself under the net and stay there. It was a losing season and the coach cut her after the last game. The counselor told her sports weren’t for everyone and signed her up for the Junior ROTC in the hope that she might develop responsibility and leadership skills, maybe start to see a future for herself beyond graduation.
Officer Sloan ran the Junior ROTC program at the high school. There was a rumor that he wrestled for money at the armory on Saturday nights, and she felt safer when he was around because no one was fool enough to start a fight in his presence. Halfway through the second semester he started taking the class to the shooting range to teach gun safety and get them some target practice.
The first time she held a gun she was surprised at its weight. The heft of it sent a charge up her arm all the way to the center of her stomach. The feeling didn’t have a name, but as she stood there turning the gun over in her hand, she felt a shift inside.
Sloan came up behind her. “It feels good, right?”
It did feel good.
“The rules are simple. Keep the barrel aimed at the floor and never point it at anything you don’t mean to destroy,” he said.
He showed her how to open the cylinder and load the bullets. One by one she slid them into place, then flipped the cylinder closed. He took the gun and handed her earmuffs, pointed the pistol toward the target, and fired off a round.
She watched him, the twitch in his shoulder, the bullets shredding the paper target at the end of their lane.
“Now you,” he said, and she reloaded.
He stepped behind her, adjusted her grip, and put his hand on the back of her right shoulder blade. She shuddered. It was the most human contact she’d had since sitting on her father’s lap in church.
Sloan didn’t notice. “You’re going to feel the kick right here. Brace for it and pull the trigger.”
When she fired, his hand caught the kick in her shoulder. The bullet tore a hole near the center of the target.
“I knew it,” he said. “You’re a natural.”
He stepped back and she emptied the cylinder. It was like a wind sweeping through her bones. The gun was hot in her hand, her breath steady and even. Her spine straightened as though tempered by the strength of metal. Guns cracked all around her, up and down the firing lanes, and left an intoxicating smell in the air.
* * *
She got a part-time job at the range just to be near that noise, smell that smell. For the first time in her life she didn’t mind waking early. One hour before school to empty the bins of shredded paper targets and sweep the lanes of used casings, saving the last ten minutes for practice. The rush from shredding a paper human was the medicine she needed most. Her first paycheck surprised her. She would have done it for free. She bought a necklace at the strip mall, a bullet on a chain that once she put on, she never took off again. Her enthusiasm pleased Sloan and earned her the honor of packing up the pistols and carrying them to the backseat of his apple-red truck each Friday after class ended.
Scared. She’d felt scared for as long as she could remember, but pulling that trigger made everything different. Holding a gun calmed her more than the pills, more than the breathing techniques the counselor had taught her, more than a match head on her skin. She didn’t need to burn anymore and the counselor took that as a sign of progress. The weight of the gun, the smell, and the blast annihilated fear, squashed and contained it to a size she imagined small enough to fit inside the bullet she wore around her neck.
The bullet was a touchstone that she reached for each morning. A totem, a solid thing to hold onto when so much else seemed vague. She held it in her hand whenever she heard the train pass through town, remembering the terrible noise from the wreck, knowing it had been a curse for her parents to die with that noise all around them. She drew strength from the bullet on her way to school, as she walked down Park Boulevard past the Feed & Seed, the small white church with its high steeple, and the motel where the drunks sat on the curb so close she could smell the whiskey on their breath. The bullet gave her the strength to jog until the air smelled clean again. She touched it when she walked through the lunch room trying to find an empty table where she could eat her bag lunch alone, when she left the school grounds in the afternoon, and at night when she crawled in bed. Her fingers were wrapped around the bullet when she closed her eyes and the last pill entered her bloodstream, traveled to her brain, and allowed her mind to go dark for a few hours.
* * *
She was dreaming of her granddad when she woke on Friday morning. She knew he’d been in the army years ago, that he would be proud of her aim and the skill she had in handling a pistol. After class she loaded Sloan’s truck with the gun cases. He’d parked behind a stand of palmetto bushes, which made it easy to hide while she slipped the smallest revolver from its case and stuffed it in her backpack.
Alone behind the gun range, she loaded the bullets she’d stolen from Sloan’s truck. She spun the cylinder a few times, feeling the metal’s satisfying clicks, snapped it closed. The weight of cold steel resting in her hands, the power she felt stirring in her gut. It made no sense how much she loved having this thing all to herself. She touched the bullet hanging around her neck, remembering her father’s wedding band and how she would play with it on Sundays while listening to her granddad preach. The church was hot on those mornings. Air-conditioning wasn’t in the budget and the windows were too high up for a decent cross breeze, but it wasn’t considered Christianly to complain. Before the heat pulled her into a stupefying sleep she would sit on her father’s lap and play with his ring. His hands were big, the ring too small to slip over his knuckles, but she would try until her eyelids grew heavy.
She thought about waking up in church with her father’s arm draped over her shoulder as she walked to the retirement home. The old man had aged fast and seemed to be caving in on himself more each week. After his stroke they kept him strapped in a wheelchair, his head bobbing, drool spilling on the pajamas he wore all the time. He never talked but moaned often and loudly. He was on the front porch when she arrived, watching an egret over by the oleanders stalk its supper. It stabbed a lizard and ran to the edge of the grass.
The pill she was supposed to have taken at lunch was still in her pocket. She popped it in her mouth and chewed it to make the calm come faster.
She showed him the bullet on its chain. He nodded and it seemed he understood. She wiped the drool off his chin with the blanket draped across his lap. She told him she’d brought a gun to show him, that it was inside her backpack.
He grabbed her hand and she was surprised at his strength. He knocked her hand against his sternum, mouthed the word Here.
“Yes,” she said, “I have it here.”
She told him how anytime she touched the bullet she felt better.
His hand dropped to his knee and waved like a dying fish, perturbed, uneasy. A squirrel came onto the porch, sniffing around for the peanuts the staff set out every afternoon. Callie hated squirrels, thought of them as rodents with fluffy tails. She kicked at it and it jumped into the grass.
“Me,” he said.
“What?”
He grabbed her hand and placed it over his heart. “Right here.”
A red truck pulled into the parking lot and she thought briefly of how almost everyone in town had a relative in this place.
It was the first time her granddad had touched her in years, but now she understood. She’d taken the gun for one reason, loaded it for one reason.
She slung her backpack over her shoulder and wheeled him back inside, through the dining hall where the staff was putting out fresh bibs and juice boxes, down a corridor of rooms with noisy te
levisions, past the aide at the medicine cart and the janitor mopping the tiled floor.
She got her granddad inside his room and locked the door.
The gun was wrapped in a hand towel inside her backpack. When she unwrapped it and showed it to him, his eyes turned bright. He mumbled some words that might’ve been a prayer. She took it as a sign. He was rocking back and forth. He was excited and so was she.
Someone tried to open the door and her granddad hushed. The handle jerked a few more times then stopped.
He tapped his chest and mumbled more things she couldn’t understand.
Red lights hit the windowpane. Another ambulance, another resident, another old-timer with a stopped heart. He stared out the window briefly then looked back at her. She brought the pistol close to him. He reached for it and knocked it out of her hand.
It was disgusting having to put her hands on the floor under his bed, guessing at the kind of germs that were sticking to her palms. The pistol had slid next to some half-eaten toast and a ball of used tissue. She grabbed the gun and crawled out from under the bed.
She understood this was scary for him, yet she knew what was right. She had aim. She had this one skill. She was a natural. Then she had a moment of doubt. Maybe he didn’t understand. Maybe waving his hand like that meant something else entirely. Maybe she had it all wrong.
A voice shouted from the hallway. Someone banged on the door.
There was always doubt before she swung at the ball, before she lit the match, doubt before swallowing a pill. She knew not to give in to doubt. She had intuition. When it came down to it, she had follow-through.
She put the pistol to her granddad’s chest, took a deep breath.
The blast knocked her against the wall. She slid to the floor wondering how there’d been so much kick. Maybe she hadn’t planted her feet. Maybe the gun had misfired.
The window was blown out. Her granddad still sat upright in his wheelchair, the floor and his lap covered in shattered glass.
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