It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

  “You’re even more stupid than I thought then.”

  “Then so be it.”

  She gave me a look that said: You’re impossible… I smiled at her in a manner that some might assume sadly. She hugged me again. I felt a tear slip free. I took a deep breath. I whispered, “It shouldn’t hurt this much when she and I didn’t really know each other.”

  Angela said, “She was your mom, James. It’s going to hurt no matter what.”

  I nodded, felt her fingers stroking my back through my father’s shirt, felt her hair soft against the side of my face. I said without thinking, “I wish you could run away with me.”

  She released me again, and it felt as if a part of me were dying. I preferred she say nothing in reply, and she did, but then she slapped me. I nodded again. “I had that coming,” I said. “I’m really sorry for everything; I wish you knew how much.”

  “I do know,” she said. “I know.”

  I thought she might hit me again, but she rubbed her palm, which was red, and she wandered away from me, into the living room. She stared at my mom and said, “You missed your dad’s funeral and now you’re going to have to miss your mother’s.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.

  “Well, you need to start thinking,” she said, turning toward me. I moved up alongside her and tried to hold her hand but she wouldn’t allow it. She said, “Does Harley know?”

  “I don’t know where she is. I thought she was dead but one of the neighbors said she was here and left not long before I stopped in.”

  “Did you go acting stupid earlier today?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I thought some bad guys had hurt my sister.”

  “Even if they did, it doesn’t give you the right to take the law into your own hands.”

  “She wouldn’t have ever done anything about it, and she couldn’t have if they’d killed her.”

  “But you know now that they didn’t kill her.”

  “I know that now,” I said. “I didn’t then.”

  “Do you think maybe she invited you back here so someone would kill you?”

  “What?” I said. I wanted to hit her and the anger that rose in me, so quickly, almost drove me to it. Angela seemed to see the change in my face, in the shape of my hands. She looked at me with pity and it only made me angrier. I said, “How could you say that?”

  “Have you thought about it?” she asked.

  “No.”

  But I was thinking about it now. Harley, the scared little girl who heard that her monster brother had killed her daddy. Harley, who had had a family one day, and then the next only her mother, her hurt, angry, bitter mother who swore to protect her, who told her things I would never be privy to because neither of them could ever tell me because they could never trust me. Could my sister have set me up? My innocent little kid sister who had slumber parties and dreamed of being a princess and loved ponies and thought the world of me before I’d fled our home?

  I shook my head. I said, “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “I don’t know,” Angela said. “But I do know that she has very mixed feelings about you. And she’s not the little girl you left behind, James.”

  “I understand that,” I said.

  “Do you understand that she talked to my dad?”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to get through your head. There was only one reason for her to do that.”

  “You think she wants him to kill me?”

  “Him or anybody who has the guts.”

  “I’m going to find her,” I said. “I’m going to just ask her.”

  “You are going to get the hell out of town, James.”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Would you do it if I went with you?”

  “Would you?”

  “Would you do it if I did?”

  “I’m going to have to eventually anyway,” I said, “whether you went or not.”

  “That boy I loved is still inside you,” she said.

  “You sound so sure of that.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Maybe I did need to run. If I stayed I’d only make things worse. I looked at Angela and said, “Do you really think Harley wants me dead?”

  “I think she runs with a certain crowd for a reason,” she said. “And I think she called my dad today for a reason.”

  “He already knew I was back in town.”

  I told her about my run-in with her father the night before at the Electric Lady and how her father had said he looked forward to snuffing my candle. She looked uncertain and I could see her trying to align the image she had of her father with a policeman who would intentionally cast off his sworn duty for revenge.

  At last, she said in a tired voice, “He’ll do it.”

  “I’m sure he’ll try,” I said.

  “He doesn’t give up, James.”

  “I know,” I said. “And he’s had a long time to think about how he can get away with it.”

  I trembled with a new thought, one that shook my very core. Angela saw the emotions it caused pass across my face and she opened her mouth to ask me what was wrong, but I held up a hand to stop her. I could see myself tied to a chair in a small room with no windows. I could see Don Gray there, smiling, my little sister behind him, her face unreadable in the shadows. I said, “Did you hear what they talked about?”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Harley and your dad.”

  “I wasn’t there when it happened. I just borrowed his phone at the station today, had to act like my battery had died. I went into the ladies’ room so he couldn’t bother me and scrolled through his recent calls. He talked to your sister. He talked to Fat Lou. He talked to a few other people that he shouldn’t have.”

  “What other people?”

  “Just people,” she said. She slapped my arm, and she added, “Trust me, James. You need to get out of here while you can.”

  “I need to talk to Harley first.”

  “What will that solve? Can’t you feel it in your gut that she’s set you up for a fall?”

  I didn’t know what I felt, but I knew what I didn’t want to feel, and that was that my sister could hate me so much. I asked, “Why would your dad talk to Fat Lou?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Robert Stevens told me that Harley borrowed a huge amount of money off Lou to pay my mom’s medical bills.”

  “So?”

  “So, how could a daughter who does that also have it in her to have her brother killed?”

  “Do you think she paid someone to kill you instead of paying for your mom’s treatment?”

  “I didn’t mean that at all.”

  “Do you know for certain that she paid for the treatment?”

  “Robert said she did, and knowing Harley, she did.”

  “You don’t know her, James.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Is there a way to find out?”

  “I’m sure your mom kept records of the bills.”

  “She always kept all the bills stacked by the microwave.”

  “Let’s look,” Angela said.

  I nodded. “You look.”

  She did. I stayed in the living room with my mother’s corpse. Angela came back in a few minutes later. Her face seemed more crestfallen than ever. I said, “What?”

  “The latest bill, from a couple days ago, doesn’t show any substantial payments on her account.”

  “Maybe it takes a while for them process it,” I said, reaching for anything I could grasp onto. “If she didn’t spend the money there, where did she spend it?”

  “I don’t know,” Angela said. “But how could she do it anyway? Fat Lou isn’t a banker. How does she explain she got a large sum of cash all of a sudden?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “In that case she lied to Robert. He said he’s helping her pay it back.”

  “Something sure as hell doesn’t sit right with
me.”

  “Maybe she planned to borrow the money and run away when Mom died. Go somewhere she could live cheap and start a new life,” I said.

  “It’s possible,” Angela said.

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “I already told you what I believe. You can’t trust her.”

  “I heard you the first five times, I’m kind of getting sick of hearing it.”

  She smiled. She said, “Sometimes I think you deserve everything that happens to you.”

  “And the other times?”

  “I think that you can’t help it.”

  I was still processing what she said in the silence when we heard a car pull into the driveway. My pulse jumped. I ran to the window and glanced out and saw Don Gray exiting his unmarked cruiser, which was parked behind Robert’s Jeep, and as he began to look up, to view the windows, I jerked back.

  Angela said, “Oh shit, is it my dad?”

  “Great guess.”

  I headed toward the back of the house while she tried to compose herself. I felt the pistol digging into my gut. I pulled it free and Angela looked over her shoulder at me and whispered harshly, “Get out the back door, now!”

  But Don might figure I’d do that if he saw me. He was sharp. But he didn’t beat on the door. He knocked softly and called his daughter’s name. And then he called Robert’s. The moment he found out Robert wasn’t there, he’d know someone else was driving the Jeep unless Angela could create a convincing lie and then sell it to him.

  I hid in the laundry room at the back of the house. I stood near the open doorway and listened as the front door opened and Angela said, “Daddy!” and there were tears in her eyes, the thickness in her throat affecting her voice, and she told him that she just got there a few minutes ago and she couldn’t find a pulse on my mother’s wrist.

  Don’s heavy footsteps entered the living room. The rocking chair creaked as he touched my mother roughly. I could imagine him in there, his back to his daughter, and the smile that would begin to play on his lips. He had been waiting for this day for ten years. Some people say that your whole life builds up to one irrevocable moment, and Don would know that his at last had come. It would feel liberating, to know that his conscience need not be bothered by how my mother would take the death of her son. He would take great pains to make my murder last as long as he could, so that it felt like the ten years he had endured his nightmares: of watching his best friend and his partner die inside the doorway of the bank, of the shame he felt for hiding behind their cruiser and doing nothing as I took potshots that would have killed him as well if he’d so much as raised his head above the fender of the car he hid behind. He would still be hearing the buckshot digging into the hood, the whine of steel on steel, the crack of glass, and he would still feel his heart thudding in his chest.

  But with me at the end of his gun, the fear would turn to excitement.

  Angela was silent. Don said something too quietly for me to hear through the walls.

  His daughter said, “Robert?”

  Then, foolishly, she paused, and said, “Oh. Robert.”

  I heard Don knock my mother’s rocker into the wall as he stood.

  I heard the hiss of his voice as he asked Angela if I was still on the premises or if I had slipped out, and if she had stalled for me, that I might escape.

  Then I heard flesh on flesh, a loud, sharp crack, and Angela whimpered. I could picture her in there with his form leaning above her as she doubled over. I thought he might have smacked her not only for protecting me, but also to draw me out in the reckless anger I’d stigmatized myself with. I kept my thumb tight against the hammer of my dad’s service pistol. If Angela hadn’t been in the living room with Don, I would have taken a few probing shots to find his exact location, but I couldn’t risk wounding her.

  A deeper fear was that he might use her body as a shield while he worked his way silently down the hall. I was afraid for the first time in a long while. I didn’t want to glance out into the hall and see him with his pistol already raised, his finger pulling the trigger. I heard his voice in the living room. Angela cried out again. She yelled, “Stop! You’re hurting me.”

  Don said, his voice like a growl, “You hear that, Elmore? You here? You know you’re the one hurting her, right? This is your fault. And if you don’t come out I’m going to throw her out the front window. You know why? Because your craziness has infected her. Hell, she’s been pining for you and pretending she wasn’t for years. You hear me? Come on, save her, smartass.”

  I waited a full minute, my pulse racing so fast my chest ached. My hands were sweaty. I wiped them on the khakis and blinked, finding the courage to peek into the hall. I would kill him, and then what? It would be one less enemy, but it would create one more child with a parent lost to violence.

  I couldn’t risk going in there since Angela could all too easily get caught in the crossfire. I whispered, “I’m sorry, Angela.” And then headed for the door a few feet away, keeping my ears attuned to any floorboards creaking and signaling Don’s approach, but it was hard to listen because I heard Angela’s muffled cries more than anything. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about Robert’s Jeep. It would not earn him any favor with Don, and Robert was already in enough trouble with Lou. I twisted the door handle and pushed the door open as quietly as I could. I waited for the loud screech of un-oiled hinges, holding my breath, unsure where I was supposed to find Harley now other than to head back to her trailer or to see if she’d just go to work tonight like nothing much was happening.

  I slipped outside and shut the door quietly behind me. I told myself that Don wouldn’t hurt Angela, not much, nothing more than bruises, but honestly, I didn’t know what he’d do. Sometimes, when people wanted something so badly, for such a long time, and then found out that someone they cared about had stood between them and their objective, the person could flip out, do something reprehensible that he would not have done otherwise.

  There was no point in worrying over something I couldn’t change. She was safer in there with only him than she was if he and I were in the room with guns and she stuck in the middle. I cut across the backyard. There was a small garden in the corner, one I could imagine Robert and Harley helping my mom till, and plant, and weed, and harvest. Probably for years now. A small white fence, waist-high, bordered the back of the property. I hopped over it, and I was about to glance back at the house to see if Don was in the kitchen or the laundry room, Angela’s hair wrapped up in his fingers, her face past the pain now, angry, yet like a blank page compared to his, but I heard something, felt its presence, just a second before I heard it growl and its shadow cut across the lawn and its weight hit me, knocking me through the fence I’d just leapt. I dropped the pistol. The dog, a German Shepherd, had a hold of my shirt at the shoulder. It had nipped the skin and my blood was hot, but the dog was merely dragging me by the cloth now, snarling, taking me to its master to show him what it had caught in the yard. The pistol was lying in the grass where anyone could pick it up. And I thought, This is the worst fucking time for him to be standing there, as I saw the back door of my mom’s house open and Don Gray trample down the steps, his pistol held tightly by his thigh, and the dog snarling still and my shoulder hurting, and that damn pistol ten feet behind me, near the broken fence.

  Don was almost to the fence when Angela stumbled outside and cried, “Dad! Stop!”

  He ignored her. She cried, “Please, don’t!”

  Yes, I thought, as he bent over and picked up my dad’s pistol and tucked it into the front of his pants. The German Shepherd stopped, its breath hot on my neck, its gaze locked on this new threat. Don pointed the pistol at the dog and said, “Get back unless you want to be worm food, mutt.”

  I said, “If you’re going to shoot, shoot it first, would you?”

  Don said, “If I could get it to, I’d have it bite your fucking head off.”

  “Get it away from me,” I said.

  Angela wa
s in the middle of my mother’s lawn behind her dad. It appeared she’d hit some type of invisible wall that she couldn’t scale. She took a step forward. A step back. She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand. I said, “Don’t let her stand there and watch.”

  Don glanced back over his shoulder. He loved his daughter, at least from what I’d always remember. His slapping her wasn’t a daily thing. He doted on her like my father had Harley. But he was disappointed with her for trying to protect me. He opened his mouth to speak.

  I felt the dog’s breath disappear and then it jumped over me and hit Don in three bounds, low in his back. It bit the wrist of his gun hand once he was down. It tried to shake the gun free, hunched down low to the ground, but Don was just as ferocious and he beat on the dog’s rib cage with his left hand. If it released his gun hand and sank its teeth into his neck, he’d be finished. It would have made things easier for me. And I didn’t feel much of anything as I watched Don struggle with the canine. I was just glad it wasn’t me anymore.

  His wrist was bleeding pretty badly by the time Angela said, “Stop it before it hurts him.”

  I pushed myself up and found it hard to breathe. “I don’t know that I can,” I said, but not loud enough for her to hear me. I glanced around the backyard I was standing in. I saw a small shed, the type you can buy at TSC to store your riding lawn mower and seasonal tools in. I ran to it. Looking back, I saw Don clubbing at the dog with his left hand but every time he hit it, he screamed out too because it only dug the animal’s teeth deeper into his wrist.

  I opened the shed door, glad it wasn’t locked. I found a shovel and carried it at a flat run, slower than normal, so pumped on adrenaline that my breath was nearly too shallow. I swung and turned my hips into it and the flat steel made a hollow gong sound as it cracked the animal’s skullcap. It let out a strange whine as its eyes rolled back in its head, and oddly I felt guiltier over hurting it than I had felt when I shot Lincoln outside his club.

  Don eased his wrist out of its mouth. He rolled onto his back and held the mangled arm over his stomach, his eyes shut tightly, his face wrenched up with pain. I stared at him for a good, hard, long minute. I told myself, I need to end it right here. All I have to do is take the blade of this shovel, and drive the tip as hard as I can into his throat… True, it would have been bloody and maybe a part of me would have died further when I was just starting to feel something again, but before I could contemplate anything, Angela called out my name.