The Third Step

by William Lobb

  Jack looked at him and said, “You seem smarter, Frankie.” Frankie stared off into space as “Free Bird” started to play on the jukebox and he shook his head. “It’s good to be home, Jack,” he said and he got up and walked over to the booth where he wrote the poem to Pam what seemed, now, like years ago. He sat down and started to think about Zara.

  There was so much unfinished business with Zara. Their relationship was as a mystery. He didn’t know how it started or how it ended. Did it end? He trusted her completely, but there was always a nagging doubt. Maybe it was that he felt unlovable or unworthy. Her prostitution was a small part of her and who she was. He consoled himself that she was the madam now, but it was more than that. Her job didn’t really register with him at all. There were so many other men. He would hear comments about her on the street. Comments about how she looked like Marilyn Monroe, and guys wondering, “Who is fucking that today?” It was something he could never identify as anything but a nagging doubt. When they were good together, it was unlike anyone or anything else either of them had ever known, but when it was broken, it felt hopeless, at best. The past few weeks, it had felt broken all the time.

  He pulled a picture of Zara from his wallet. He realized she looked the same to him as she always had. Now, for the first time, he saw her as she was, not as he wanted her to be. He looked at the photograph and it felt like bad acid from back in the day. As if things were now skewed slightly out of alignment, maybe more depth or another layer, but in between the lines he could see the things that were always there, but he would never allow himself to see.

  He only needed to sit there for a minute and look at the picture, look at it good and hard and realize that smile had been telling him the same thing for a long time, possibly since the beginning. He’d simply refused to listen. He was listening now. It wasn’t the smile that was lying. It was him, lying to himself. The truth can be a little like poison. A lot like poison. It can be poison. Some poison needs to be drunk, absorbed, survived, and learned from. Everything is here to teach us something. Sometimes the lesson wants to kill you. Sometimes it would be easier if it did, kinder, cleaner.

  The challenge, the strength comes from drinking the poison and turning away; clenching one’s teeth, spitting out the foul taste of stupid arrogance and pride and taking the first step toward freedom. How long had it been since he’d seen the daylight or breathed in the clean fresh air?

  He took comfort in knowing the last time he saw her would be the last time he saw her. That day it was strained and uncomfortable. The perfection, the spell, had collapsed upon itself and died. He knew he would survive this ending as he had all the others, but this one would leave a mark at the point of all the cuts.

  The terrain he walked and lived in would never be the same. Everything from the outside looked perfectly the same. Nothing was the same. Nothing would ever again be the same. This one hurt. This one he just crawled away from, broken and bleeding, but still alive. There are times when that is all we can walk away with, simply to be alive—broken and ruined, but alive.

  He finished his club soda and took the glass back to Jack, at the bar. Jack said, “So, you’re not going back to see Pam?”

  Frankie stared at the floor and shook his head, smiled, and shook Jack’s hand. He turned around in the doorway and he looked back into The Lovely: the booths, now full of people getting drunk. The long, dark, aged and stained bar, and the stools lined up in front of it, were now half-populated with people on a mission, a mission Frankie knew well, but no longer participated in. The big Rolling Rock lighted sign, hanging off the mirror behind the rows and rows of half-empty bottles of cheap booze. He took a long hard look at the jukebox, listened to one last strain of “Freebird.” After all these years, that song was still the number one hit for the Turf’s Lovely Tavern.

  He smiled, shook his head, and walked out of the door for what felt like the last time. He climbed in the Rambler and drove off to Alex’s house. He’d sleep on the couch there again and then take the tractor down to Cora’s garage, where he still had some tools stashed. He needed to do some basic maintenance things and then make some calls, get a load, and head out on the road until he found Juan Carlos.

  Chapter Forty-one:

  Frankie Meets

  Juan Carlos

  He woke up early the next morning on Alexandrine’s couch. Grabbing some clean clothes from his bag, he went upstairs to shower. Alex heard him fumbling around and went downstairs to make coffee. It was a cold December morning and it had snowed a dusting. Alex looked out the dirty kitchen window and thought how pretty and clean the rundown neighborhood looked, as if it had been whitewashed by the snow, as if the poverty and crime and the sadness had taken the morning off. She knew all too well this was simply another illusion.

  She poured two cups, mixed in cream and sugar, and went out to the coffee table to wait for Frankie. Frankie came down, kissed her on the cheek, and drank his coffee as they watched the morning news on the flickering black-and-white TV. Frankie got up and refilled their cups. Standing, he said he’d drive the tractor down to Grandma’s garage. When she was ready, if she’d come down to meet him he’d give her a ride back home. He was going to leave the truck there a few days while he worked on it. He needed the Rambler to get back and forth.

  He walked outside into the cold morning air, and was suddenly reminded of how much he hated the cold. He climbed into the tractor, fired up the engine and let it warm up, pumping huge plumes of black diesel exhaust into the cold morning air. He sat, smoked a cigarette, and watched the gauges. When the engine was warm, he backed out of Alex’s driveway and headed on down to the old lady’s property.

  He still could not believe the house was gone. His uncle held the deed to the property. He needed to go see him. Maybe he’d buy it from the family. He had always wanted to live there, but with the house gone he couldn’t understand the draw. Now that she was gone, it was just a rocky, hilly, piece of land, with a very dilapidated garage sitting off in the corner of the lot.

  But sadly, it was something he needed to connect to. His connections seemed to be dwindling by the day, down to where the old woman’s property, his grandfather’s property, and the collapsing garage were his last connection to home. He needed a home, to find home, to feel home.

  Now, clean and relatively sober, relatively sane, the grounding, solid, reassurance of home was one thing sorely needed and missing. Looking around, he realized he’d lost his way home. Every bridge he’d ever crossed was now smoldering ash. Alexandrine was a part of home, along with the old lady, his grandfather, and the bar. He chose not to include Pam. He’d been thinking about Zara and how he thought she would be home, but that was only a comfortable and dangerous stop along the way. He had no compass, no mechanism to get to that wondrous place called home. With its warmth and comforts and clean sheets and food cooked on a stove and not a grill in an aluminum and stainless-steel diner.

  As he drove along, down Route 94 toward the property, he told himself this was the life he chose, the life he wanted. He was still an outlaw and he still had a job to do. He had to find Juan Carlos. When he got older, when he was done collecting his stories, after this job was done, he’d find a home and a wife, maybe Betty, and a dog and maybe a kid. He’d get a job someplace, not the factory, and pack a lunch and watch baseball on TV.

  He backed the tractor up close to the garage. He questioned the wisdom of deciding to work on the tractor here, practically outside. He climbed down out of the tractor and went around the back of the crumbling building and grabbed an armload of firewood. Entering through the side door, he walked across the dirt floor to an old pot-bellied stove. He opened the door and a few mice scurried out. He laughed, “You’d better run or be cooked.”

  He lit a fire with some kindling and old newspapers. Then, he slowly added the split wood. He knelt there a few minutes, absorbing the warmth of the growing fire. He walked over to the corner where
an old Craftsman tool box stood, once red and black and shiny, now rusted and dirty and covered with cobwebs. He looked up at the roof and saw that someone, probably his cousin, had thrown a huge blue tarp over the gaping hole in the roof. It helped keep the heat inside.

  Standing in the open overhead door frame, he watched the cars occasionally pass by. It was a quiet, late autumn day. The cloudy sky began to spit snowflakes and the air turned colder. The wind, icy out of the north, began to blow.

  He lit a cigarette and thought about the old lady and Christmases at the house no longer there. He remembered the house and the smell of the propane stove and the crooked kitchen floor. The tiny Christmas tree stuck in the corner of the tiny living room in the ancient house. That was pretty much the extent of the celebration—just put up that tiny tree in the corner and wail some Christmas songs about Jesus. That old woman, she sure did love her some Jesus.

  He stood in the open doorway between the wall and the rear wheels of the tractor, smoking another cigarette, putting off starting to work, watching the cars out on the road. It was a small, country two-lane road, never much traffic. He was pretty sure he’d seen the same car riding up and down three or four times now: a late model Chevy with three guys in it. They passed the house again. He saw the brake lights as the car stopped and backed up. The car sat there in the road for a few seconds. The three men inside the car looked over toward Frankie and the tractor and the garage. The driver turned the wheel and pulled the car into the driveway, about twenty feet from the tractor.

  Frankie stood there and stared at them. He finished smoking his cigarette. The doors of the Chevy opened and the driver and the passenger got out. Then the passenger opened the back door on his side and a man emerged.

  He got out and stood up, looking at Frankie. He smiled and said, “The word is you were going to kill me. I thought I’d bring the fight to you. You have a big mouth, my friend, and your close friends are worse. It took me about an hour to find you. It’s a nice day to die, don’t you think, Frankie?”

  Frankie had a pistol hidden in the side door of the tractor, wrapped in a towel and buried inside a tool box. He hated guns, but today he might make an exception. It had been loaded a long time ago. He was now wondering if it would fire and if it even mattered. Juan Carlos had considerable firepower, as he recalled. It would be good to at least put up a fight. He opened the side door and staring at Juan Carlos he reached inside, fumbling with one hand for the pistol.

  He yelled back, “Can you at least tell me why you needed to kill all of us?”

  Juan Carlos smiled and said, “You boys were messing up my game. You were a hell of a runner, you and your friends. I needed to shut down your buddy, Vinny, so killing you all just made sense. Now it’s your turn.”

  For a brief second, Frankie felt fear, not of what was about to happen, but fear that he was moments away from finding out if his atheism was well-founded. Suddenly his arrogance escaped him. What if everyone else was right? What if the old lady and her Jesus were right? It seemed kind of late to be questioning his convictions now. Frankie, always able to outrun any situation, to escape by the skin of his teeth, was now at a place that looked like it could be the end.

  In one fast move, he opened the door to the cab and scrambled up the two-step ladder, knowing full well the fiberglass body would offer little protection. He jumped into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine as the car’s driver and the passenger ran to the trunk and pulled out some artillery.

  He pulled the tractor into gear as the first bullets began to fly through the cab, hitting him in the left leg. The shot forced his leg off the clutch and the tractor groaned and shook and stalled. Now both men from the car were firing, rapidly and relentlessly. The fiberglass body of the F and G Produce tractor was being blown apart. Frankie felt more shots. At first, they felt like punches, hard, small, focused punches. Then, he felt the torn skin and the sting that told him the bullets were now inside his body. The shots kept coming in an increasing barrage, literally shredding the cab.

  Frankie felt the blood escaping from his body. It felt cold as it flowed from him and ran down his legs and torso. He felt shots to his chest. He now lay sprawled across the doghouse over the engine and he looked at the ceiling of the cab as bits of leather and fiberglass and spongy material and glass exploded in the air. He couldn’t move. A few shots had hit his back and his spine. His legs were paralyzed.

  He still had the unfired pistol in his hand. He considered putting it in his mouth, but even at this late moment, in this increasing and incredible pain, Frankie wanted to hang on. He realized his terror. He knew he was moments from death, but he could not bring himself to rush the process. Death, his death, would arrive on its own, very quickly, and while still unwelcome, the pain of his body was not as bad as the pain of his fear.

  The gunshots stopped. Outside, Juan Carlos went to the trunk and took out the RPG. Frankie heard him yelling, “Frankie if you’re still with us. I’m going to blow your ass up now.” Frankie, hanging on, close to the end, could only lay there and bleed.

  He heard a voice, the old woman’s voice. It said, “Pray boy, simply pray. But hurry, boy.” Frankie, still, at this moment, could not bring himself to do it, even if he’d wanted to.

  He pointed the pistol in the direction of Juan Carlos and the car and pulled off about four shots from the pistol before he dropped it.

  From down the road, the Rambler approached, with Alexandrine at the wheel. She slammed on the brakes and watched in horror as Juan Carlos fired the anti-tank RPGs into the shredded truck body. Three of them exploded into the cab. Alex had a sense that she was watching her friend die at that exact moment. She swore she could hear a mournful wail as the grenades exploded in the cab and the fire ignited the materials in the truck.

  Inside, as Frankie felt the flames licking at his body, he began to shake and writhe. The flames, he remembered from the LSD dream, from that night alone in the forest that seemed like years ago now. The tractor would be his pyre. He laid there for what seemed like hours, but must have only been seconds. And, like every man he had ever killed, he watched, almost as a detached observer, as his own life passed away. His last thought and sensation was a shaking and a muffled scream and a moaning that sounded like an empty ship rubbing against a dock . . . then silence.

  Chapter Forty-two:

  Funeral For Frankie

  Alexandrine sat in the Rambler, stunned. Unable to move or talk or cry, she sat there with the car running in the road. She watched as the car with Juan Carlos and the two other assassins backed up and drove away. A fire truck, followed by two state police cars, came screaming up behind her. Alex pulled the Rambler off to the side or the road, waited for them to pass, and then she drove on toward the smoldering tractor, following the police cars.

  The fiberglass cab, what parts were not melted from the fire, looked like a honeycomb, simply riddled with bullets. Alex climbed out of the car and slowly walked over to the cops, like she was on eggshells, still in shock. She pointed to the smoldering tractor and said, “My friend is in there.” The cops had a lot of questions, she had few answers. Soon after, they moved her away from the wreckage and cordoned off the area with yellow and black police tape. They took down all of her information and they said she should go. They would be in touch.

  She walked back to the Rambler and wondered if Frankie would be left to die in peace, or would there be an investigation that would reveal his crimes and transgressions. In every game, there are winners and losers, but Frankie had, finally, really lost everything. She thought about how scared he must have been. She knew he feared death a lot more than most people. His entire life had been plagued by this fear.

  She drove back to town slowly and in shock, directly to Turf’s, not a place she frequented, but a necessary stop. She parked the car out front and walked inside. Jack, the bartender was there. Pam sat talking to Jack and drinking a club soda.
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  Alex tried to smile and sat down next to Pam. She blurted out, “Frankie is dead. I thought you’d want to know,” and she started to cry. Pam, an acquaintance, maybe a friend, wrapped her arms around the big woman and cried with her.

  Jack just said, “What the fuck and how?” Alex, wiping her face said, “It was the cartel guys. I saw them. They didn’t care. They were proud of their kill. What a scene! It looked like a war zone.”

  Jack and Pam had more questions and Alexandrine tried to answer as best she could. Jack bought her a couple of shots of scotch and a Rolling Rock chaser. Then they all sat there quietly.

  Finally, Alex said, “I guess it’s up to me to plan a funeral. I don’t think he had any family left, except a couple of uncles and some cousins. I should call them now.”

  Jack handed her the phone from behind the bar as she fumbled and fought in her wallet for the small business card she carried. It had all of Frankie’s contact numbers written on it in tiny block letters. She looked at the neat lettering, Frankie’s handwriting, and she started to cry again. She called his uncle and they agreed she would make the arrangements.

  Alex thanked Jack and kissed Pam on the cheek and said she’d call them when the funeral was set. She walked out toward the Rambler and drove home. It was starting to snow again. The day didn’t look so pretty to Alex any longer.

  When Alex got home, she called the state police station, then the funeral home, then the brothel in New Orleans. Payton answered the phone. It was an afternoon of grim conversations. Payton didn’t say much, She called Zara to the phone. Zara said they would book a flight. Alex said, “There will be a few days’ delay, I’m sure. They will need to perform an autopsy. Senseless if you saw the truck. I cannot imagine what his body looked like.” Alex thanked them and said she’d be back in touch when she knew a date. She asked Zara to tell David, too, and Bianca. Zara said she certainly would.