It's Only Death

by Lee Thompson

“Since I was nineteen.”

  “Why does Robert think you borrowed seventy-five thousand off Lou?”

  “Fine,” she said. “What does it matter if I did?”

  “What did you do with the money?”

  She cocked her head a little and wiped her eyes. “Somebody broke in and stole it.”

  Then she sobbed. When she looked back at me, she said, “I have to pretend when I see Lou and Robert that I’m right as rain, that I paid the money on Mom’s medical bills. And I’m going to have to pay all that money back and I only had it for a couple of days.”

  I wanted to put my arm around her and hold her. I thought, Just do it, but I couldn’t because if I touched her, I thought she might toss me out and that we’d never get a chance to speak again simply because she wouldn’t allow it. I said, “Who knew you had the money?”

  “Nobody,” Harley said.

  “Was anything else stolen?”

  “My old television,” she said. “It was a lot smaller than that monster.”

  I looked at her new television. I could see our reflections in the blank screen. We looked so much older than I’d ever thought we could look. I said, “Who knew about the money?”

  “Nobody,” she said. “Lou and Robert. That’s it.”

  “You never mentioned it to Lincoln?”

  “No.”

  She seemed to be telling the truth, but that didn’t mean that Lincoln didn’t prowl her trailer in the middle of the night if he ever stayed over, once he’d waited for her to fall asleep. I said, “Do you want me to help you find the money.”

  “How the hell are you going to find it?” she said.

  “I know…I’m not a detective.”

  “Not only that,” she said. “I meant what I said, I don’t care if you die, and I don’t want you here.”

  “I wish you could be happy,” I said. “I hope you are someday.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  I took a deep breath, not sure what to say next, and sometimes, when I didn’t know what to say, I’d just say whatever was bouncing around inside my skull. It happened then. I said, “Have you talked to Lincoln lately?”

  “No,” she said. “Actually I’m kind of sick of him. If anything, he was just something to do and help me keep my mind off Mom.”

  “What do you really want to do?” I asked.

  “When I was sixteen I wanted to be a dancer. Ballet.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I said, thinking about the dream Angela had never seen to fruition. I tried to remember my own dream but couldn’t. There was a big bloodstain covering it. Harley took my hand and held it and she shook her head.

  “You’re only twenty-one. You can still do ballet.”

  She released my hand and stood and walked into the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?”

  My shoulder hurt. I hadn’t noticed it for the last few minutes. I asked if she had anything strong. She brought back a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a two-liter of Coke. She returned to the kitchen for two glasses. Once she was seated next to me again, she fixed our drinks and sipped hers. She said, “You really let Don live when you had the chance to kill him?”

  I nodded. “It was probably the second biggest mistake I ever made.”

  “Dad was the first?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She leaned back again and said, “I never thought I’d see you again. I sent you a couple of emails over the years before I found out Mom had pancreatic cancer.”

  “I know,” I said. “I didn’t know how to reply to them.”

  She sipped more of her drink and smiled sadly. She was barefoot and stared at her toes as she lifted a leg and rested her foot on the coffee table. Harley said, “Am I ever going to see you again?”

  “I don’t know that I’m going to get out of here alive.”

  “You make enemies everywhere you go.”

  “I won’t let the cops take me to prison either,” I said. “They’ll have to kill me.”

  “Don will. Just because you showed him mercy, don’t expect the same from him.”

  “Thanks for talking to me,” I said.

  “I’m as surprised as you are,” she said, pulling her foot from the coffee table and leaning forward, her elbows dug deeply into the tops of her thighs. “Are you going to miss me?”

  “I’m sure I will,” I said. I wished I didn’t have to leave at all, but there wasn’t any choice. But first I had something to do. She told me she loved me, whispered it, and I said, “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  I pushed myself up from the couch and pulled the polo shirt back on. I said, “I love you too.”

  Harley walked me to the door. She said, “Just run away, please.”

  “I will soon.”

  “Send me a message every now and then. One of the hardest things to deal with was my birthday and the holidays and each year thinking it would be the one time you sent a message to ask how I was doing, or at least to wish me a Merry Christmas.”

  “Happy Fourth of July,” I said, then I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. Harley’s face grew red. She wrapped her arms around my back and held me tightly and it hurt my shoulder, but I hugged her back and little else I’d ever known had felt as right, or as wonderful.

  I said, “I want you to have a meaningful life.”

  My sister hugged me tighter and she cried into the crook of my neck. She sobbed and said, “I want you to have a meaningful life, too, but I know you won’t.”

  9

  I let out a long breath as I walked out to Robert’s Jeep, my sister in the door of her trailer behind me. She still had tears in her eyes, and she looked very young and very vulnerable, yet she tried so hard to look as if she didn’t care.

  She waved as I dropped my weight tiredly into the driver’s seat. I waved back and got on the road. I didn’t know if she was lying about someone stealing the money Lou had loaned her. I replayed what she’d said through my mind a few times as I drove aimlessly. I thought that she had sounded genuinely distressed. It was a shitload of money and tied her to Lou and Robert for a long, long time. What had Robert said? A decade for her to pay it back, and that was with his help. And I was certain that Lou probably charged her interest, maybe she’d have to pay him back a hundred large, maybe more, or maybe she would be at his beck-and-call 24/7. It was hard to say, but I knew that he wouldn’t do it just out of the kindness of his heart. And it had all been pointless since the money was stolen and she couldn’t tell Lou, because what man in their right mind would believe a woman who borrowed so much and then came back a week later with an “I’m so embarrassed by this, but…”?

  Yeah, Lou wouldn’t listen to a word of that. A debt was a debt.

  But thinking about Lou and thinking about all of that money, and how Harley said the only two people who knew about the loan were Lou and Robert, the gears began turning quietly in my head. I cruised quiet neighborhoods, tinkering with my thoughts, trying to coerce whatever it was to come out into the light where I could examine it. I pulled over to the curb, my chest hurting. I looked at Robert’s Jeep and thought: Fucking A. Fucking Derrick…

  I shook my head in disbelief. But it made sense to me that somehow Derrick would hear about the loan, and he had already approached me about robbing Lou’s place with him. The kid was a thief and unashamed of it. For a few minutes, I didn’t know where I was since I hadn’t paid attention to where I was going.

  Ten minutes later I found a main road and drove to Robert’s house. It was early evening. The sun was far in the west. The air was warm but smelled of rain. I parked in the driveway, trying to decide how to play it with Derrick, if he was even there. I thought he might be heading out to bounce at the Lady soon, or had possibly already left.

  I thought: If he’s gone, then I’m breaking in and finding his room and searching it…

  There wasn’t a car in the driveway and there wasn’t a vehicle parked against the curb. I didn’t even know if Derrick had a ride, o
r if he relied on public transit, or had one of the dancers or another guy who worked at the club pick him up and also bring him home after closing time. I didn’t know much of anything, but I was positive if anyone stole Harley’s money, it was that kid.

  I got out, kept an eye on the front windows and front door.

  Don’t be here, kid, I thought.

  I glanced at the houses across the road. Judging by the cars, it was an older neighborhood populated by twentysomethings and starter families. No one seemed to be watching me. I approached the front door and listened for any sounds from the house. I couldn’t recall ever breaking into anyone’s place, although I can’t discount that I’d ever done such an act, since I had cancelled out many memories in my life.

  I knocked and waited for someone to answer.

  I wondered if I could find an open window. It seemed like the best approach, not having to break the back door or something more destructive. I tried to avoid thinking about Harley’s money and the selfless thing she had intended to do for our mother. She had been like that as a child too, always doing whatever she could to make our parents beam. But the money was gone, and the hard truth was that a kid like Derrick would have blown through that seventy-five thousand in a matter of days, there might not even be any of it left. And what then? Harley might not mind me strangling Derrick but Robert surely would. And I didn’t want to break the kid, really all Harley needed was for Derrick, if he had in fact robbed her, to tell Lou the score and that he was taking over whatever payments had been arranged. It’d take Derrick the rest of his life to pay it back though—he probably didn’t make more than fifteen bucks an hour whereas Harley could clear a grand in four hours of work—but it would be better than me or Lou or Robert killing him.

  I was so deep in thought that I didn’t hear the door open. Derrick grinned out at me. His hair was tousled and he rubbed his eyes. “What the hell?” he said, grinning sheepishly. He was wearing plaid pajama pants and no shirt. He had the look of someone whose muscle would quickly atrophy a week after he quit pumping iron. He said, “You all right? You look kind of strange.” He pointed at the blood on my shirt.

  “I’m good,” I said. “I wake you up?”

  He nodded. “What’s up?”

  “A few things. You guys have any coffee?”

  “Sure,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously for a moment before he opened the door wider and waved me in. The front door opened on the living room. It had an old couch with dirty socks curled up in front of it, a scarred coffee table with thick panels of glass embedded in it, a television by the window that made me wonder if he’d taken it from Harley’s when he’d found the money. I didn’t know how to distinguish if it had been hers. I said, “Nice TV, where’d you get it?”

  “It’s my brother’s,” Derrick said. He cocked his head and added, “Rob’s not here. He pretty much lives at Lou’s mansion since he started working for him. Lucky bastard, you know?”

  “You seem pretty jealous of him,” I said. I walked around the house, looking at things, with Derrick following me, until we ended up in the kitchen. He made coffee. We sat at the table while it brewed. I said, “Are you jealous of him?”

  “Hell no,” Derrick said. “I don’t want all the responsibility he has.”

  “What do you want?”

  He looked at me curiously, and then broke into a grin. His teeth were very straight and very white. I’d seen younger siblings throughout my life who had all of the best clothes, the biggest dentist bills, got the prom treatment and the college fund, to make up for being second fiddle, even if the firstborn had not received anything but hand-me-downs from neighbor kids and a solid work ethic from their folks and had to prove themselves in everything they did. I don’t know why, but I always thought it made the younger kid in a family more of a coward, and they usually felt more entitled. It wasn’t like every family was like that, but I’d seen enough to know that it was more common than not.

  Derrick said, “I want to be like you.”

  “What do you think I am exactly?” I said, genuinely curious.

  Derrick leaned forward and rubbed his thigh. “Free, man. You’re free. What the hell else would I mean?”

  “I’m not free,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You’re more free than anybody else I know.”

  “You think knocking off Lou’s place will help you achieve your dream?”

  “Is that why you’re here?” he said, grinning again. “Man, I knew you’d want in on that. The way I got it figured, both of us could disappear so quick, you know? And you’ve already done it, so you could tell me, you know, so I don’t get caught.”

  “Where would you go?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I was thinking Mexico. That’s where everybody goes, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Not Mexico.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Living in Mexico always seemed like a shitty way to live to me.”

  “It looks good on television,” Derrick said.

  “Lots of things look good on television.”

  “So,” he said, “are you in on robbing Lou’s house?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I said.

  “Good,” Derrick said, grinning that boyish grin. Someone would someday shoot that smile right off his face. He said, “Good, real cool.” He interlaced his fingers on the table and looked directly into my face. “When I first opened the door, I thought you looked like you wanted to kill me.” He laughed. Shook his head and said, “Crazy, right? I guess that’s just how you look when you’re seriously considering something like this.”

  I thought: I’m still considering killing you. You’re the guy who ruined my sister’s life. Maybe not in the same way I did, but just as badly.

  “I guess so,” I said, wanting to bounce his face off the table. The coffee finished brewing. He rose and poured us each a cup and brought them over. I said, “What’s your plan for robbing Lou?”

  “Plan?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you know: your course of action. How do you plan to do it?”

  “I haven’t thought that far into it,” he said. “It’s just been daydreaming, you know? I figured you’d be the one who came up with something. I don’t really have any experience.”

  “You know what happens when I rob someone, right? I shoot people because it keeps other people’s faces buried in their hands. You want me to shoot Fat Lou and Robert?”

  “What?” he said.

  “I don’t understand what you want,” I said.

  “I just want the money.”

  “What would you do with all that money, Derrick?”

  He sipped his coffee and stared into the cup. Something in his face changed, it was subtle at first, but when he looked back up, all the youthful playfulness was gone. He said without a trace of humor, “People would fucking remember me.”

  I nodded and waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, I said, “Remember you for what?”

  “Why are you asking me all of these questions?”

  “I just want to know what you’d really get out of it all.”

  “What did you get out of killing your own dad?” He smirked, his eyes flat. He thought, somewhere deep inside him, that we were just alike. Maybe we were, but I didn’t think so. He reminded me more of a used-car salesman, a young one, while I felt like a very old man who had no illusions about the worthlessness of my life and how foolishly I had squandered any natural gifts I’d had.

  I said, “Did you steal something from my sister?”

  His fingers tightened around his coffee cup. I braced myself to dodge if he threw it at my face. There isn’t much time to think once you pass a certain point so it’s good to think ahead, to pay attention, especially when you see someone change right before your eyes like Derrick did mine. It sent a hollow pang through my center as I wondered if my mother had seen that same cold rage define my features when I was still just
a boy.

  Derrick said, “What the hell are you accusing me of?”

  “Did you steal anything from Harley?”

  “No,” he said and looked at the sink. When he glanced at me again, his smirk was back. He said, “I can’t believe you’d say that.”

  “It really hurts right,” I said.

  “It does.”

  “Not as badly as I’m going to hurt you if you don’t tell me the truth.”

  “I’ve got at least thirty pounds on you,” he said, leaning back in his chair.

  I pulled my father’s pistol and set it on the table in front of me. I said, “Tell me the truth, Derrick, or I will splatter your brains all over the wall.”

  He swallowed and there was an audible click in his throat and his gaze stayed locked on the gun. I gave him time to think. I didn’t care if he told me he spent it all, I just wanted him to admit he’d fucked up and that he’d try to set things right.

  He said, “There is something really wrong with you.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t take anything from your sister.”

  “Did you hear about her loan?”

  “What loan?” he said.

  But he still wasn’t giving me his attention. He was afraid he’d tell me the truth and I’d shoot him and walk outside and go about my life as if he’d never been a part of it. Probably another way that both my mom and Harley felt from time to time. They were right, there was something really wrong with me. I said to Derrick, “You have five seconds to tell me if you heard about Harley having a bunch of money.”

  I picked up the pistol. It felt heavy in my hand.

  “Wait,” he said, raising both hands and sliding the chair back as he kicked away from the table. “I told you I didn’t steal it.”

  “So you knew about it?”

  “Yes, Robert told me he helped her out.”

  “What exactly did Robert say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did he say he helped her out?”

  “He said he talked to Lou and did like a split loan with your sister. That’s all.”

  “Robert didn’t tell you how much?”

  “No.”