THUGLIT Issue Thirteen

by Kevin Egan

  That guy in the baby-yellow polo and sandals. What a dumbass, leaving his kid in a car in the dead of summer. Kids and dogs die that way all the time. Any guy who wears a baby-yellow polo shirt has to have something missing.

  The kids usually speak up if we try to take a car while they're inside it, though. They might scream or cry. That way, Pedro and I can abort the job right away. Pedro takes off running like the criminal he is. If the kid is alone in the car without any parents, I take some time to break all the windows open so the kid can breathe.

  Pedro was reaching into his tracksuit jacket. He pulled out a .38 and put it in my lap. "We'll take him into an empty lot."

  "Fuck you, take that shit off me," I said without touching the gun.

  "Fine, I'll do it. You fucked this up, but I'll do it. I'll unfuck it like I do, I always do," Pedro said and took the gun back.

  "You missed the exit. Take this one," I said.

  Pedro was speeding now and cut someone off to get to the exit. The car held its horn as it raced by. Pedro barked something in Spanish.

  I checked the time on my phone. "Go right," I said.

  Pedro didn't stop for the red and rolled right through. "Call Hambles," he said.

  I called Hambley.

  "Hambley."

  "Sunrise. Drop?"

  "Same. Got a minute and a half still."

  "We won't make it."

  "Call back in a minute and a half."

  "Tell me the new drop now so we can head that way."

  "Fuck off," Hambley said and the line went dead just as I was telling him to fuck himself and that I would drive the Maserati into the ocean before I put on another orange suit and built school furniture for another ten years, all so he could sew hundred dollar bills into his underwear.

  "Don't mouth off to Hambles like that, you be shot dude."

  "You don't even say his name right. It's Hambley. Don't tell me how to talk. Pull around behind that corner store right there. Let's wait a minute."

  Pedro drove around behind the corner store but didn't cut the engine. "This is fucked. We can't hang around with a car like this at a place like this, look at this shit. Those niggas over there already staking us out."

  "Watch your fucking mouth, there's a kid in the car." I looked back to see the kid was still there. He'd given up swinging his legs. It looked like he had tears in his eyes and his face was twisted up like he'd just bit into a lemon—I think because he was trying really hard to be quiet.

  "Chill out, kid," I said. "What's your name?"

  Pedro sighed and banged his head against the window.

  "What's your name?" I tried again more gently.

  "Joe. J, O, E. I'm three," he said and sniffled.

  "You like Disney, Joe?"

  Joe shook his head no, really exaggerated it.

  "Oh ok, your dad in the yellow shirt makes you listen to it then?"

  He shook his head no just the same way.

  "Call Hambles," Pedro said.

  "Fuck you, I'm talking to Joe. Joe, listen what's gonna happen. My friend here wants to make sure you get back to your parents okay. But for that to work, you gotta listen to what we tell you to do. It's gonna be like a game."

  "Call Hambles. I'm taking the kid for a walk." Pedro got out of the car with the keys and went around to the other side of the car to get Joe out.

  Pedro unbuckled him and pulled him out, set him on his feet. Two shirtless black kids came out of the corner store with melting ice cream cones running in their hands. They looked like they were going to come over and kick it behind the store till they saw Pedro there with Joe—Pedro looking bad like he always does with his unzipped tracksuit and his cross. They turned and walked off.

  I got out after Pedro and Joe. In a way, I thought maybe the thing Pedro was going to do was best for Joe if the kid was just going to turn out traumatized like me. He was three, maybe not into the safe zone yet, though. Pedro took Joe off toward a rusted chain-link fence. There was an overgrown parking lot inside the fence that looked like it was being used to keep piles of stone.

  I dialed Hambley.

  "Let me guess. Fucking Sunrise."

  "You told me to call back in a minute and a half."

  "Sure I did, then I heard some words before I hung up. Call me back in another five. Let's have you sweat it out for being a punk."

  "Hambley, give me a break man. We ran into some traffic and you know we're under pressure here. Taking a Maserati around the docks neighborhood, that's stupid. We gotta lose this thing."

  "Good, then you'll call me in five. And you'll shut your mouth before you do it."

  I didn't say anything, waited for the line to cut.

  I saw that Joe had stopped outside the fenced off lot and was shaking his head hard like he did in the car about Disney. Pedro was trying to coax him into the lot.

  "Come on kid, there's ice cream," said Pedro.

  Joe turned and pointed back toward the corner store. "I saw eye-cream there."

  "No dude, we gotta go cross the street for the good shit, come on."

  "Eye-cream that way," Joe said pointing.

  Pedro went to lift him.

  "Yeah Pedro, he's right," I said. "They got ice cream here at the corner store. Come on over. Hambley is making us sweat it out another five minutes anyway."

  Pedro came over almost forgetting Joe.

  "How long he think we got before cops crawling up our asses dude?"

  "He doesn't give a shit, Pedro. Let's get the kid some ice cream, then we can do the thing," I said and nodded my head over toward the lot so Pedro knew what I meant.

  "Last supper," Pedro said and tapped the gold cross hanging between the zipper tracks of his jacket. "Yeah, that's okay. Last supper."

  We went in and got a cone from a fat black woman who scooped it out of a big tub. Joe got chocolate. Pedro got chocolate chip cookie dough. I didn't get anything, but I paid for it all with cash.

  Out back behind the store, we watched Joe lick his cone. He watched us. He was wondering what we were doing, I think. His entire face got colored brown.

  "Alright kid, let's go for a walk while we eat," Pedro said after a couple minutes. Joe followed Pedro back toward the stone lot. I walked a couple paces back. If I was going to be part of this thing, I wasn't gonna sit back and pretend like I wasn't.

  Joe went into the lot, Pedro leading him through the stone piles.

  "What that?" Joe said and pointed at a big pile of slate-gray rocks with a chocolatey hand. The other hand was busy smearing the cone across his cheek.

  Pedro had moved around behind him, was reaching in his jacket now with his free hand. He did the sign of the cross with his ice cream cone and the .38 flashed out in the sunlight. He put the muzzle to the back of Joe's head, but I took out my Glock and fired once through Pedro's skull before he could pull the trigger.

  Blood and white ice cream spattered across Joe's back as Pedro went down.

  Joe turned slow-like, but I got between him and Pedro and scooped him up off the cracked pavement. He started screaming and dropped his ice cream. He screamed loud. So loud that I worried about him getting attention—whereas the gunshot in this kind of place wasn't such a big deal. I put my hand over his sticky mouth and hustled him out of the lot and went to put him in the Maserati, but it was locked and I remembered then that Pedro had the keys.

  "Be quiet, Joe. Be quiet," I said, but he was still wailing. His eyes were big and tears were coming out fast. I took him by the wrist and dragged him around front and into the corner store.

  The black ice cream lady looked alarmed. "What's that boy crying about?" she said.

  I smacked my hand on my head and said, "He dropped his cone, got a little upset."

  "Oh," the black lady smiled big. "Well let's get you another one, honey," she said and bent over to pull the lid off the ice cream tub.

  That's when I heard the worst sound in the world. The quick double chirp of a police cruiser. The cruiser pulled right into th
e store lot and turned on its red and blue lights. I heard some more cruisers coming down the road, and I knew then that I would be leaving in one of those cruisers—or else a bodybag.

  Joe had stopped crying because he was staring out at the flashing lights and that seemed to interest him. I took out my gun. When the ice cream lady came up from the tub with the first scoop, she didn't look all that shocked.

  "Get on the ground, lady. I'm holding this place up and there's gonna be some shooting, I think. Take the kid and get on the ground."

  "I ain't getting on the ground," she said. "Put that damned gun away."

  I pointed it at her. "I'm holding up the place and you're my hostage. Now get on the fucking ground."

  She just stared at me with her eyebrows raised.

  Car doors were opening and sirens were howling till there was a whole symphony of them all around the store.

  Joe looked up at me. He looked out at all the flashing lights and the cops who were positioning themselves behind the doors of their cruisers. A megaphone came out.

  "Let the kid out first. Then come out with your hands where we can see them."

  "What you doing?" Joe said to me. I was standing there with a Glock hanging down by my side, staring out the front windows of the store, wondering the same fucking thing.

  I know I'm a dumb guy. That's why I keep going to jail. Guys who leave their kids in a car in the dead of summer don't know they're dumb because they drive a Maserati and haven't been to jail. They even dress like they aren't dumb. They wear baby-yellow polos and leather sandals.

  Joe pointed out the window. "Why there peace cars?"

  "We took too much ice cream," I said. "Now they got to put me away." I looked over at the ice cream lady. "I'm gonna need all the ice cream in the store. How many tubs you got?"

  "You can't carry them all," she said. "God, you stupid."

  "I'll take two of those tubs and I want you to give my buddy Joe here all the chocolate flavor you got. The whole thing of it."

  Joe looked back and forth between the black lady and me, wondering if he was really about to come into a whole bucket of ice cream for himself. The black lady sighed and hefted out two full, frosted tubs of vanilla ice cream. She pushed them across the counter and stared at me with her arms folded over her breasts.

  I left my gun on the counter and took each tub under an arm. I walked up to Joe. "Remember me as the guy who just wanted too much ice cream, Joe. I hope you forget all the other shit."

  Joe nodded. Then he said, "You share the eye-cream with the peace cars?"

  "Yeah," I said. I wasn't sure he really got the message. "I gotta go," I said and went out the front door. I got tackled right away and the two tubs of ice cream popped out of my arms. One hit the pavement next to my head and barfed a whole slab of vanilla out.

  Those cops pulled my arms back hard, like they wanted to rip them out of the sockets, so I asked them to cool it. Instead they drove a knee into my back. Whenever you ask a cop for a favor, you usually get a knee in the back. As I was grinding my teeth, the way I do when I'm getting arrested, I looked over at the corner store window.

  Joe was there on the other side watching me, his mouth open a little, a chocolate hand pressed up on the glass. I winked at him, but I always wondered after that if he really was watching me, the infamous ice cream snatcher who dropped in on his life one summer afternoon, or just staring at the big tub of vanilla ice cream melting across the blacktop.

  Selfie

  by Tim Hall

  This is not a confession.

  Confession implies crime, and if there is one thing I am sure of it is that I have done nothing wrong. When one looks at what the rest of humanity defines as innocence—which is no more than a state of perpetual ignorance sustained by superstition and laziness—then the entire notion of guilt or innocence becomes laughable. If I am guilty of anything it is of being exceptional, a beacon of hated light in a world that worships darkness.

  We are born manipulators, natural thieves. We manipulate love and call it family; manipulate money and call it business; manipulate people and call it leadership. The person society calls a criminal is guilty of nothing more than being an entrepreneur, striking out in new territories, inventing new truths and creating new knowledge for others to codify, legalize, commoditize. We are the miners looking for the vein of gold in the darkest depths of human experience, constantly being foreclosed upon by those who judge us from the surface of things. The boundary between what is permissible and impermissible is called the law. Those who manipulate that edge for their own gain—the politicians, police, and other petty power-mongers—are the lowest form of all, the manipulator manqué.

  Oh dear. This is beginning to sound like a manifesto.

  But enough about me…what do you think about me? Have you heard that one? It's my favorite joke—and yet, like so much that this culture misunderstands about itself and its own motives, it misses the point entirely.

  What is humility but the successful manipulation of vanity?

  I write this because circumstances beyond my control—a tragedy with which even the most exceptional men must sometimes contend—have conspired to force me into an impossible situation from which there is little hope of escape. Lest anyone doubt whether or not I am truly exceptional, just consider that I am able to write this document at all, when I am on the verge of total ruin, and possibly death.

  If you were to see me here right now, sitting at my laptop, I would appear to be a normal man engaged in a normal activity: surfing the Web, writing an email, or perhaps composing a novel or a play. A tour through the rest of the apartment would reveal nothing strange: a comfortable one-bedroom flat with a bright kitchen; two young children, asleep on the couch in the den; in the master bedroom a woman, lying on the bed as if taking a nap, perhaps the wife or girlfriend of the clean-cut, professional young man in his early 30s (which most people assume I am) writing in the front room. Like I said, it would be a perfectly normal, American scene, except perhaps for the gun lying next to the laptop.

  To bring the scene into sharper focus, I would also add two additional facts:

  —I do not have a wife or girlfriend, and

  —The children are not mine.

  Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong millennium. I believe I would have felt more at home in ancient Greece. That was a culture! Those were people who knew how to recognize the exceptional man and treat him accordingly. America has destroyed all that.

  As for the gun: they will say that it does not belong to me either, and once again, that would be the accepted consensus of the professional manipulators. But it most certainly is mine. The old man who owned it before me kept it in a cabinet in the back of his garage, unused, for nearly fifty years. Use it or lose it, as the saying goes.

  The old man was my neighbor during my brief and unhappy time as a schoolteacher in rural New England. The less I say about that time the better, but it has come to have special significance in my life. Shortly after the school year ended (I was not asked back, which suited me fine), I found a new job at a small nonprofit organization, back in the comparative civility and sophistication of New York City.

  I had spent nearly a full year in New England and had made no real friends, owing to the general unlikability and coldness of the local Puritans. One exception was my elderly neighbor, who always greeted me with a warmth that I found touching. I interpreted his uncharacteristic friendliness to mean that he perhaps saw something in me that others had missed—a certain dignity or bearing in my manner that his years of experience had taught him signified a special person. Still, we spoke only rarely and usually about mundane matters like the weather. It was not until I was ready to leave that miserable town for good that I decided to stop by his house, to say good-bye.

  I confess that I had something of a selfish motive for the visit. Secretly I hoped to get something from him, as a going-away present—a souvenir of my time there, as well as a confirmation that the old man real
ly did see me as someone special, perhaps extraordinary. Old people often have unknown treasures in their homes, and I had often wondered what valuables the old man might have sitting around: original Hummel figurines perhaps, or some pieces of sterling silver. Something to show people later, proof that I had made a connection, that I was the kind of person to whom other people gave things. Something I could sell if I needed to.

  I rang the bell and after a short wait he answered. I told the old man—I don't recall his name right now—that I was moving the following day and wondered if he had any small furnishings he might be willing to part with for a few dollars, to help me set up my new apartment in New York. But rather than invite me in, as I expected, he thought for a moment, nodded tightly and said that there might be something in the back.

  We went to the detached garage behind the house. He flipped a switch and illuminated a crowded, foul-smelling dump of a room, piled with rusted tools, sagging cardboard boxes and cluttered work tables.

  He rooted through the trash on one table and pulled out a tangled mess of metal. It appeared to be a table lamp. He thrust it at me.

  "Might be able to use this. You'll have to get it rewired though. And a new shade."

  I was enraged that he would offer me such a piece of junk—clearly I had been mistaken in my neighbor's estimation of me—but I accepted the offering and forced a smile.

  That was when I spotted the box.

  It was on a high shelf. My first thought was that it was an old toy, in which case it might be very valuable—I know that vintage toys are much more collectible when in their original packaging. I did not ask permission, but pulled it down and showed it to the old man. He took the box and opened it. Inside was a gun.

  "Colt Cobra," he said wistfully. I was so stunned that I said the first thing that popped into my head.

  "Is it real?"

  "Course. Been sitting there since the late 1960s. Never even fired the thing."

  "Why not?"

  "Lots of folks yelling about revolution back then, overthrowing the white man, that kind of stuff. So I got it for protection. Wife wouldn't allow it in the house. Never even got ammo for it. Said she'd leave me if I did. I put it up there and forgot all about it."