Blood, Guts, & Whiskey

by Todd Robinson

  Gordon floored the gas pedal, the S65’s powerful engine making him feel like he was riding a Valkyrie charger; he should have had Wagner blasting from the harman/kardon instead of the DJ’s current neocon monologue driveling pointlessly from the speakers.

  The two gunmen froze and whirled to face Gordon as he bounced the roaring Mercedes half up onto the sidewalk, accelerating like a rocket even as he aimed to make sure he missed the black guy’s body on the sidewalk. For some reason Gordon didn’t want to feel the guy’s corpse under his tires.

  Time slowed down, nothing existed but Gordon, his Mercedes war wagon, and the two men in front of him. Everything to either side was a blur pouring past, irrelevant bystanders pointing in slow motion. All Gordon’s attention was focused on the two gunmen as their staring openmouthed faces got rapidly closer, limned in a crimson glow in his eyes. Gordon realized he was literally seeing red as a keening sound leaked from his mouth, and spittle flecked his lips in a dense foam.

  In the last few instants, one of the gunmen started to jump out of the way while the other one raised his pistol and started shooting at the Benz, at Gordon actually. Gordon ignored the bullet holes starring the windshield as the supersonic rounds cracked through the interior of the car past his ear and out the rear windshield like angry hornets. The Mercedes was doing at least eighty as it clipped the fleeing gunman in the hip and sent him spinning through the air to the side like Jackie Chan on crack.

  Gordon could see the unbelieving look on the other gunman’s face in the final molasses-slow instant as the Mercedes folded him over at the waist and pinched him in half against the lamppost behind him. Gordon saw guts spewing out the guy’s mouth even as the Mercedes’s hood folded in half around the lamppost, the airbag deployed, and the Benz came to an instant apocalyptic halt.

  The expanding airbag slammed Gordon in the ribs like a jack hammer, and there was a red blossom of pain in his face as the airbag surrounded his head and upper body and blocked his vision completely. Gordon clawed in panic at the bag, which pressed him like a prisoner against his seat. Finally he calmed down enough to grope the keys out of the ignition and rip at the fabric of the bag until it deflated.

  Gordon scrabbled the belt off, wrestled the warped door open, and half crawled out. Broken glass crunched underfoot as he reeled drunkenly to the front of the car, which was hissing like a tea kettle as steam escaped the ruptured radiator. The black guy’s corpse was lying in the gutter, what was left of his face pointing at the sky. Gordon ensured the gunman he’d crushed against the lamppost was dead too, shooting him in the head with his Desert Eagle, which had found its way into his hand somehow. The 50-caliber round almost made the kid’s head evaporate as it hit. The other gunman was nowhere in sight, and it occurred to Gordon to wonder just where he was.

  He strolled into the dry cleaners that the three men had vomited forth from, the Desert Eagle dangling nonchalantly at his side. The second white boy was in there leaning against the counter, hopping on one foot with his ruined leg dangling, holding a middle-aged black woman from behind by the throat, his pistol muzzle pressed against her temple as he lurched around on his only working leg.

  Gordon looked down at the guy’s hip and leg as the woman writhed and contorted her face at him; the kid was panting hard enough that his breathing was a series of yelping snarls. His hip actually looked dislocated from when the Benz had sent him spinning through the air, and his foot was twisted at an impossible angle. His leg was swelling so fast, it looked like a balloon filling to press tight against the inside of his pants leg.

  “You’re not getting far like that,” Gordon observed. The kid’s eyes glittered, but that was his only response.

  “Homicide in the commission of a robbery,” Gordon mused. “You’re looking at lethal injection, or at least life without parole.

  “You’re trapped,” Gordon continued. “There’s no escape for you, you’re doomed.” Gordon studied the kid closely as he spoke, but his words seemed to have no impact. Instead, the kid was listening to the distant, approaching sirens.

  Going for a psychological whipsaw, Gordon focused on the black woman, who trembled in her captor’s grasp, eyes pointed as far away as possible from the pistol pressed to her head. “What’s your name?” Gordon asked, seriously interested despite the distraction she represented.

  “What?” she asked, looking at him in disbelief.

  “What’s your name?” Gordon repeated.

  “Larella, I’m Larella.”

  Gordon returned to looking the kid deep in the eyes, trying to reach him for some reason. “You’re scaring Larella, son. Is that how you want to go out, how you want to be remembered? The kind of scumbag that does a woman wrong?”

  Gordon waggled the Desert Eagle but kept it down at his side. “Let Larella go, boy,” Gordon said. “Let’s keep this between us, go out together like men.”

  The kid’s face slowly sagged into stillness, and his gaze seemed to turn inwards for an endless moment or three. Then he grinned, flung Larella off to the side, leaned back against the counter on his one good leg, and whipped up his pistol to fire at Gordon.

  Gordon grinned right back at his current best friend as the kid’s shot missed and the bullet whizzed past Gordon’s head to his right. Gordon’s Desert Eagle spoke three times in reply, every round on target: triple tap, two to the body and one to the dome. The kid’s bloody rag of a corpse slid down the counter to lie on the floor, disjointed from the three 50-caliber black talons.

  The black woman was pressed back against the wall as if trying to get as far away from Gordon as she could. Gordon looked at her with interest, the grin still on his face as he objectively noted the woman’s revulsion towards him. “You liked it,” she hissed in accusation.

  Gordon’s grin widened even farther as he realized she was right.

  She escaped out the door away from Gordon, knelt next to her husband’s body, and commenced to wail and grieve. Gordon holstered the Desert Eagle and followed her out at a stroll, ignoring the approaching sirens and the shocked babble of all the surrounding bystander drones on this busy Berkeley street.

  Yang’s S65 was still wrapped around the lamppost; the almost-headless dead kid was still folded in half, face-down on the hood with arms outstretched. All the Benz’s windows were shattered. Safety glass lay strewn all around it on the sidewalk, and fluids drained away into the gutter as though the car was bleeding to death. This fine piece of German machinery was totaled.

  Gordon felt a momentary pang at the waste of a $200,000 car, but then he chuckled at the irony: this was one piece of community property Yang wouldn’t be able to hold over his head anymore. He even considered showing up at the divorce proceedings tomorrow. If he signed, Yang would get half his shit. If only she knew, all she had to do was wait a bit and she’d get it all, one hundred percent.

  Gordon buttoned his Brioni jacket as he ducked around the corner, snickering to himself at the comedy of it all. The first emergency vehicles were arriving on the scene, and he needed to be rapidly elsewhere. He also needed some fresh smokes and a drink or three as soon as possible.

  It was good to be alive again, even for however short this little upcoming bit might be.

  News about Yourself

  Scott Wolven

  For EJS

  The fall brought some cold nights and the pond had the thinnest sheet of ice I’d ever seen. I pointed it out to Richard as we walked around the old farm, eighty acres, talking about how he wanted me to tear the buildings down and how fast I could get the job done. We looked inside the first two barns, then just walked around. We spooked some deer that were bedded down in a field near some old apple trees. The barns all looked the same inside, I was pretty sure of that. We passed by the pond again.

  “Ice melts from the bottom,” he said. “I never knew that till a couple years ago.”

  We stood on the point, where you could see across the Hudson River. Richard worked a farm on the other side, up in Greene County
. This farm, outside of Red Hook, had been a project his younger brother was going to start, before he passed away in late summer. No illness, no warning. Richard was going to have the barns and outbuildings torn down, to make it a neater parcel for developers. He didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t very well run two farms. The fall had been very slow for my logging business and I was more than happy to help Richard complete the demo and keep my machines working. I hadn’t talked to Richard or his brother since high school. His brother and I had been in the same class, with Richard a couple years ahead of us. The three of us had been great friends when we were kids. I knew his brother had gone on to college, been a fraternity man, and come home to work. He was an officer in the fire department. The past ten years or so, I just waved to them while they were working out in the fields if I happened to be in Greene County visiting my folks. I’d been out of prison about five years at that point.

  “I can do it,” I said. “It will take me a week. I’ll leave the stub-ups in place for the utilities, so if you decide to bulldoze below grade you won’t hit anything.” Only four of the seven barns were electrified and only two of those had water.

  “The electric is dead back to the pole,” Richard said. “How much?”

  “Twenty-five hundred,” I said.

  “That’s not enough,” Richard said. “You have to make money too.”

  “I’ll make money at twenty-five hundred,” I said. “My trucks are sitting right now, I’ve got to get them on a job. Might as well be this one.”

  Richard nodded. “My family will appreciate that.”

  “How’s everybody doing?” I said.

  “It was a real shock,” Richard said. “We’re watching out for each other.” He looked around at the old farm. “I almost never came over here, unless he asked me to. I don’t know what he planned on doing with it.” He swallowed his sadness. “But I know he had plans for it.”

  I nodded. “Please give my best to your mom and dad.”

  “I will,” he said. We started to walk back across the property, towards our trucks. “Remember we used to play so much basketball?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “You guys had the only court that was dry in the rain, inside your barn.”

  “Once he got into the fire department, that was a big part of his life,” he said. “He was a good judge of men and fires.”

  “I bet he was,” I said.

  “Time goes so fast,” Richard said. “Time is not watches and clocks and calendars.” He opened the door to his pickup truck. There was a shot in the distance. “Muzzle-loading season opens today,” he said. “I’ll see you, Ray.”

  “See you, Richard,” I said. I stood there as he pulled away. He had work to do on his own farm.

  I started right away the next day. Brought my two big trucks up, along with a skid steer. Two of my regular guys were working with me. We ran the work in an orderly fashion. One of the guys would climb into the rafters of the barn with a logging chain and hook onto the main beam. We’d hook the other end to the skid steer and pull, which usually made the barn collapse. Then we’d load the wood and debris into the trucks with the skid steer and haul it back to my woodlot, about ten miles away. We drove with the flashers on and I followed in my pickup truck to grab anything that fell onto the road. Three barns fell that first day and we were able to haul most of the stuff off.

  The next morning at the farm site, there was a man in an SUV parked by the big house. He got out of his truck as I pulled up. He started talking before I opened my door.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m handling a job here for the Brodersons,” I said. My two guys were there already, and I waved at them to go ahead.

  “This isn’t going to developers,” the man said. “You can’t do that. The town won’t allow it.”

  “I think you’re trespassing on private property,” I said. “Hit the road.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got people coming from the town with a Dutchess County sheriff,” he said. “We’re going to put a stop work order on you.”

  I looked down the dirt road towards the barns. My guys were hustling, already had the big chain hooked up and were ready to tear down another barn. I gave them the thumbs-up and the skid steer lurched forwards. I turned back to the man as the barn collapsed.

  “Wait on the road for your people,” I said. “Get off this property.” The man looked at me like I was kidding. “I can hook a chain on your truck and drag it to the edge of the property,” I said. “Or you can drive it there.”

  “Do you know who I am?” he said. “I’m Cal Sheely.”

  “Like I give a fuck,” I said.

  “Who are you? Some tough guy?” he said.

  “Find out,” I said. “If you want to get in a fight, I’ll help all I can.”

  Cal sized me up and must have decided I was tipping the scales too much to mess with. He got back in his SUV and pulled to the edge of the road, off the farm. I kept my eye on him. He sat there for almost an hour before he pulled away. We had loaded up the truck at that point and were ready to make a haul back to my woodlot. I called the guys over.

  “Let’s make a change today,” I said. “Let’s put all the structures on the ground right now, as quick as we can. Then we’ll load and haul them. It will make for a messy work site, but that’s how I want it done.”

  They agreed and we ripped down all but the last barn when I saw some trucks pulling into the farm entrance. I stopped working and slowly walked up to see who it was. Two men from the town, a sheriff, and the man, Cal Sheely, I had seen earlier. I recognized one of the men from the town. It was Ernie Pickens.

  “Hey, Ray,” Ernie said to me. He pulled me to one side. “This guy’s got everybody in an uproar, says the farm is covered in asbestos shingles. Says you’ve been hauling it near town. It that true?”

  I pointed at the remaining building. “It’s tar paper, Ernie, with regular shingles. There’s no asbestos here.”

  “Okay, okay,” Ernie said. “Will you let us inspect it?”

  “It’s not my property,” I said. “Call Richard. If you get the okay from him, it’s okay with me.”

  Ernie walked up to the other men and got on his cell phone. He walked back to me next to the last barn after a minute.

  “Richard says okay,” he said.

  “Do what you want then,” I said.

  He motioned at the last structure. It was the largest barn, the only one still standing. We opened the big swinging doors. It smelled like wet hay.

  Inside was an old fire truck.

  “Maybe he was restoring it,” Ernie said.

  The truck must have been brought in on a flatbed. All the tires were flat. It was a dull red and most of the gold lettering had been scraped away. The axes on the sides showed rust. I climbed up into the cab. There was a yellow legal pad sitting on the front seat. There was a list of things that needed to be fixed on the truck. Along with a list of names. Richard’s name was on it and his dad’s name. It was a list of guys that he would have wanted to be on the truck with him. Some of the guys were already long dead, like his grandfather. My name was there. It said “Ray Cooper, my good friend.”

  I stepped outside, into the sunlight. The sheriff was there, smoking a cigarette. I walked over and stood next to the big farmhouse. My two workers were there and we waited until the town was done. Ernie walked over to me.

  “There’s no asbestos here,” he said. He said it loud enough so Cal Sheely could hear him. Sheely walked away and sat in his truck while we worked. Finally, he took off.

  After they all left, we chained up the fire truck and dragged it out of the barn. We chained up the main timbers and the beams snapped like matchsticks as the structure collapsed. The guys got busy putting the debris into the big dump truck and hauling it. They cleaned up the site pretty well and we were done a day early, as it turned out.

  I called Richard to tell him I was done and about the truck. The next day there was a check i
n the mailbox from him with a note that just said: “Thanks.” A couple cutting jobs turned up over the next couple weeks, and I ended up being busy into October and beyond.

  It must have been a year later, in the late fall. I was having a bad time of it, for several months. I had a dream and woke up suddenly in my own bed, my heart pounding. The dream had been that the old fire truck was running, with lights and sirens going. I got into my truck and drove over to the farm property. The truck sat in the field where I’d left it. It was too old a model even to have lights on it. Rifle shots came across the morning air and I thought about how much the hunters would hate it if I somehow got the siren to work. I got back into my truck. Something kept me from walking into the woods and fields in my tan jacket and taking my chances. Among the trees and the evergreens and the deer.

  It was a couple summers after that when something came my way. It was late August. I was sitting at the garage to escape the heat, downing beers with Jimmy Work, and he started to talk about this guy that owed him money.

  “Who is it?” I said. Jimmy had tattoo sleeves. He’d done about eighteen years overall and I met him inside after knowing him outside, which is pretty rare. He was a big guy, walked like a biker, and had a lot of biker friends. Sometimes he hooked people up with drugs—if the buy was big enough and he was sure it was safe. He made sure the rent was paid. Cash.