It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

  Robert parked a block away, on a side street where those broken houses sat, some blasting with rap music, some porches occupied by old people watching other porches full of young gangbangers already blown out of their minds by cocaine and booze and a rage they directed at anyone who wasn’t part of their group. The young kids, fourteen to maybe twenty-three, watched us park. Robert climbed out, the towel wrapped around his shotgun and he held it tight to his side. He said, “Don’t look at anybody, just walk.”

  “You think your Jeep is going to be here when we come back?”

  “What do you think? I should just drive right up to the Tribesmen club?”

  “I think it’d be smarter. Less ground to cover, less chance of getting into fights with people we could avoid brushing up against. Drive to the club, Robert.”

  “You seemed scared.”

  “I want to find Harley, not hurt people I don’t know.”

  Robert had another side to him there on that street. I think he wanted somebody he didn’t know to start something. He couldn’t do it, let his own rage go, on people there was a chance of seeing again.

  I said, “Drive to the club.”

  “No.”

  A few of the kids on the porch about ten houses down shuffled down to the sidewalk, pulling at their pants, one of them reaching under his shirt. They called to us, asking what we were doing in their neighborhood. They called us crackers and danced around, laughing, slapping each other’s arms. The kid who had his hands in his pants pulled a little pea-shooter that he probably couldn’t have hit the broadside of a barn with even if he was a great shot.

  Robert pulled the towel off the shotgun like a fool. The old people looked at him, then the kids, then each other, shaking their heads. They’d seen more violence than a person should see in one lifetime, it was carved into the accepted expressions on their faces, the ease with which they sipped tea and made small talk and waited for the gunfire to start.

  But two of the kids who were apparently unarmed made tracks for the porch. The kid with the gun looked uncertain. Robert racked a shell into the chamber, the towel in his left hand slapping against his forearm. The kid put his gun away and waved a hand at us as if he was letting us go about our business.

  I said, “You’re a fool.”

  Robert shrugged. “I don’t like punks and that’s all those kids are. They think they can throw their weight around on strangers, let them try with us. They’ll regret it.”

  “Gangs around here don’t fuck around.”

  “They look like they’re in a gang?”

  “No,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an AK-47 in the house and it doesn’t mean one of them hasn’t used it before.”

  What I said seemed to sober him a little. He checked to make sure the safety was on and re-covered the weapon with the towel. I said, “Drive to the club. I saw on the way in that the lot is overgrown. There’s scrap metal all over the place. We can be in and out of there in five minutes. This is a bad place to come back to if any of these kids get a few more of their buddies to come over while we’re running around like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Get back in the Jeep.”

  He did but he didn’t look happy about it. I said, as he started the vehicle and turned around, “You’re an angry motherfucker, but you hide it well.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing. Just drive.”

  I found it odd that Lincoln and his boys would pick this area of all places to call their home. I remembered what Fat Lou had said, that I didn’t know who I was messing with. It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were moving drugs in the area for years, that their numbers must have been much greater when they settled there and fought for a territory that they had to take from another group who would have attempted to kill them all in random drive-by shootings, or urban espionage. It gave me pause. I asked Robert, “How many of these guys are there in that club?”

  “You’re getting cold feet now?”

  “I’m just curious. There are more of them than the five I saw in the bar, right?”

  “There are a lot more than that,” he said.

  “How many?”

  “I think there are about thirty of them still alive. They lost half of their numbers over the years. Some guys just couldn’t cut it, mostly young guys who were in it for the image, or the drugs, or the women. Those kids couldn’t handle street-style executions. And Lincoln has done that with at least a dozen men. Just walked up to their car, shoved a pistol in their face and pulled the trigger.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  “So what now?” he said.

  “We stick with the plan. Pull in there and we’ll see how many bikes are there.”

  “You want to just walk in?”

  “Shit no.”

  He turned the block and approached the old bar at a crawl. Cars honked their horns and sped around us, more young kids, leaning out of their open windows making hand signals at us, some with serious faces. I said, “We should have stolen a couple motorcycles and driven them in.”

  Robert said, “I’ll look out for you, don’t worry.”

  “I think you might be the one with the death wish.” I pointed at a heap of a rusted-out truck that looked like it was from the 1950s in the deepest part of the lot, farthest from the road, and said, “Park behind that.”

  He did and we got out. We were about thirty yards to the west of the front double doors. I felt completely unequipped for what lay ahead. Robert seemed eager. It was like we’d switched bodies without realizing it. He had balls of steel, and I thought I’d been stupid, I should have waited for Fat Lou to get a hold of Lincoln and make him bring Harley there if she was still alive.

  I also wondered how deep she was into all this shit, how much she had seen, how much she had done, in the company of the Tribesmen. What happened to my little innocent sister? How much was I to blame for her submersion into the criminal underworld? It was like the little girl she had been had literally died, and something else, someone older and wiser and harder had not only taken her place, but had been the one to strangle that precious little child, all her hopes, all her faith, all her dreams, replaced by a sharper reality. I wondered: is she a victim or a willing participant?

  I wondered if it was only the environment we were in that had made my mood so gray. With our goal of attempting to rescue her, I knew I needed to get myself together, but I couldn’t. Robert pulled the gas can from the back of the Jeep and set it near the passenger door.

  He said softly, “We’ve got to follow through with this.”

  “And if she’s not in there?”

  “We won’t know until you get them out of their playhouse and I go in the back.”

  “We need more guns than we have,” I said. “Even if it’s only Lincoln and a couple other men.”

  “We’re short on time,” he said. “And we’re short on assistance.”

  “Maybe we can do something smarter.”

  “Like?”

  “Like call the police anonymously, say that we saw men at the door of this place peddling drugs to kids and we want the law to check it out. We just take it easy, we hide, we see if they bust anybody and if they bring Harley out with them.”

  “That could work,” Robert said. “Plus it’d kind of be fun to see if any of them get arrested on charges.”

  “Do you know any of the police besides Don personally?”

  “A couple, but it isn’t like I really know them.”

  “I don’t think you can risk driving out and then driving back, someone might come out while you’re either leaving or reentering.”

  “Give me your pistol,” he said. “I’ll call from the pay phone at the gas station across the road.”

  I gave him the pistol and he handed me the shotgun. He tucked the pistol in his pants and pulled his shirt over it. The shotgun felt strange in my hands. I said, “Hurry up.”

  “You got a quarter?”

  “No. Call 911.
Say you also heard gunshots from inside the building. Actually just say that, forget the drug angle. You heard someone scream and heard gunshots.”

  “Got it.” He disappeared around the junk truck. I waited for him to return, knelt down near the front end of the heap, watching the entrance to the bar. There were a couple dozen motorcycles there so it was easy to guess there were at least twenty-four men inside, possibly some of their wives or girlfriends.

  I don’t want to hurt them, I told myself.

  I’m such a liar sometimes. I wanted to mop the floor with their guts.

  After he returned from making the call, we knelt by the rusted truck for about ten minutes. I took my pistol and gave him his shotgun. I was surprised by his calmness. I glanced at my watch. After eleven minutes had passed, I was feeling restless. But a few minutes later a patrol car pulled into the lot and parked near the row of motorcycles.

  The cop was black and approached the door with a fluidity and familiarity that did not inspire hope in me. When somebody opened the door, I heard laughter, and they let him inside. He was in there for five minutes. When he came back out, he was laughing and Lincoln was with him, patting him on the back. The cop left. Lincoln smoked a cigarette, his head down, as if something were troubling him horribly. I wondered if there was some part of him that was decent, a part that had stood by helplessly and watched himself kicking my sister to death.

  Change of plans, I thought. I’ve always hated waiting for something to happen when every one of us has in our power the ability to make a choice and move on it instead of just sitting there and waiting for everything to fall into place. When he had his back to us, I walked up behind Lincoln and put the pistol to the back of his head while he had one leg hovering over the seat of his bike. I cocked the hammer and said, “Take us inside.”

  “You just dug your own grave, kid,” he said.

  “I’ll blow your brains out before I die, trust me.”

  “I do,” he said. “You got a pair on you, let me tell you.”

  “Save it. Move.”

  I grabbed the back of his vest with my left hand and kept the muzzle tight to the base of his skull with my right. He opened the door wide and raised his hands out to his sides as soon as we were in the clubhouse. It was still a bar, and there were about six men around two pool tables. There were a few tinkering on what looked to be ancient motorcycles, most appearing low and chopped and mean. There was a skinny guy with a tattooed dragon running up his neck behind the bar, a dozen men on bar stools laughing among themselves loudly in front of him. The air smelled of spilled beer, oil, and smoke.

  Lincoln said, “See what you’re looking for?”

  “Where is she?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “You’re dating her.”

  “You call what me and her have dating? I fuck her and put up with her.”

  “Shut up.”

  I heard the door open behind me. I glanced back and saw Robert stepping in with the shotgun, his face drawn, his eyes saying: You really got us in a bunch of shit now… He looked at the room, leveled the shotgun. Several men raised their hands and said simultaneously, “Whoa, fella.”

  Robert said, “Is she here?”

  Lincoln said, “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Face forward, asshole,” I told him. I thought I had to watch my index finger. It was drawing tight on the trigger, taking up a hair of slack. Once it broke a certain point, there wasn’t any going back, not that I would have minded painting the men in front of us with Lincoln’s brains.

  Lincoln said to the room, “Brothers, this is the man who ran over Shane and Adam. Thinks himself a real tough guy on account of he shot his daddy years ago.”

  The skinny bartender swallowed and said, “What do you want us to do, Linc?”

  “Kill him. Then torture the fat fucker behind us.”

  One of the men kneeling near one of the old choppers, a wrench still in his hand, said, “He ain’t playing, Linc. That kid has the same look in his eyes that you get. He’ll blow your head off, I’d bet my life on it.”

  “And,” I said, “I’m good with this gun. It was my dad’s service pistol. I’ll put holes in five other heads in the space of a few seconds, all while I’m backing out the door and my friend here is opening that twelve-gauge on you all.”

  Several of them swallowed and wiped the sweat from their foreheads slowly. I kind of felt sorry for them. Lincoln said, “Kill him already. Are you all gutless?”

  The bartender said, “What do you want, asshole?”

  “I want my sister, Harley May Jackson. Lincoln fucks her and claims to forget her but he was just at her house the last time I saw him. Anybody who can tell me where she is I won’t put a bullet in. No guarantees for anybody else.”

  “You motherfuckers better not say anything,” Lincoln said. His arms were tense, heavily muscled. He said, “The second you let me go, El-More, I’m going to pull this knife out from under my vest and I’m going to carve you up like a Thanksgiving turkey.”

  “Where is Harley May?” I asked.

  Some of the men had begun to look bored. I’d seen that before. Tension runs high for a few seconds, but the longer things wear on without anything happening, the tension begins to dissipate. I couldn’t have them all feeling like we were friends, or that any of them were safe, so I pulled the barrel from Lincoln’s neck, and fired a bullet by his ear, into the ceiling.

  He screamed and stamped the floor, patting at his ear like it was on fire. The hollow ringing in my ears seemed to stretch out for a full minute. Lincoln danced around, madder than a hornet, but I slapped the butt of the gun over his fingers and into the side of his head.

  He tried to turn and I cracked him above the right eye as hard as I could. I expected it to knock him out, but he only staggered back, grew loose, his knees sinking under his weight for a moment, before he sprang on me.

  He knocked me into the door, then out it, onto my back, his full weight landing on top of me and his fingers trying to tear out my eyes.

  I turned my head and one of his fingers felt as if it tore into my cheek.

  Out of fear, anger, desperation, I dug the pistol into his rib cage, felt him stiffen on top of me, and I pulled the trigger. My father’s pistol bucked in my hand. Lincoln shook on top of me like a train losing steam. A second later, I heard Robert firing the shotgun inside, pumping the slide, firing again, saw him moving in what seemed slow motion backward toward the door that mine and Lincoln’s weight had wedged open.

  Lincoln was breathing hard and holding his side, his fingers coated with blood. Robert stepped over us and fired again and I felt something hot burn above me. I pushed Lincoln off and scooted back on my butt until I had room to stand.

  I grabbed the gasoline can and pulled the cap off and inside heard someone fire a weapon and felt a bullet whiz by my face. I tore Lincoln’s shirt and stuffed the ragged cloth down into the gas can and lit the wick and threw it into the room.

  Men screamed. Me and Robert staggered back toward the Jeep, only took five or six steps before the gas can exploded and the windows blew out and the flames and smoke billowed out all of that new air-conditioning. Lincoln was breathing hard, covered in blood and soot. His face was pale, bunched up, and he reached out, closed his hand as if I was kneeling in front of him and he had me by the throat. I don’t know what he was imagining for sure. But he was in pain, and he would probably die, and that was nice.

  Robert was reloading the shotgun and urging me to hurry the hell up. By the time we were a half mile away in the Jeep, there was a steady mushroom cloud growing over the bar and into the sky as all that alcohol burned a hole through the roof. Robert said, “Holy shit, man. Holy shit.”

  I thought I should have felt a lot of something, but I barely felt anything. I figured Harley was dead, and she had been before I pulled up in front of her trailer and found those shitheads there. And it was my fault.

  Robert grinned and said, “I don’t thin
k I’ve ever felt so alive.”

  My cheek burned. He asked where we were going to go, what we were going to do now. I said, “Is there a way to find out if she is on some slab in a mortuary?”

  Robert said, “Man, don’t say that.”

  6

  After Robert drove around aimlessly for twenty minutes, he pulled into a gas station and his hands were trembling. He looked at mine. He said, “You’re not shaking.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “What did you do when you were away? Where did you go?”

  He was only trying to distract himself from what I’d said earlier about Harley being dead. But I could see the pain in his eyes. I said, “We need to find her body.”

  He let out a long breath that shook his bulk and he sank back into the seat and said, “I was really hoping that we’d find her there.”

  “Not to worsen what already seems hopeless, but I hope she wasn’t in the ladies’ room.”

  He frowned at me. He said, “You’re a cocksucker.”

  “I don’t think sometimes. I never did.”

  “She better not have been in there,” Robert said.

  “I don’t think she was. I was just saying it’s a possibility, one I don’t like to consider, but maybe it will help me slow down and think things through.”

  “That’s great for you,” he said. “Not so great for anyone else.”

  “I know,” I said. “I wish I could change it.” And I meant it. The words weren’t just words, I felt a deeper inner ache that I had always kind of ignored because it scared me. It was easier to just let yourself go and not worry about anything but yourself. It was harder to think about the damage you did to others when nothing much seemed to matter but your own bloodlust. People entered and exited the gas station. Old ladies, old men, young couples, punks, businessmen, filled their vehicles, carried Hostess cupcakes, bought forty-ounce bottles, beat a pack of cigarettes against the heel of their hand, everyone’s eyes glazed. I said, “Trust me, I’ll feel horrible if I got her killed.”