Run

by Douglas E. Winter

  Good night, I said. Maybe to Fiona, after the kiss. Definitely to Mom, by the time I get to the last cabinet.

  You’re drinking again. An observation, nothing too judgmental; no kind of tsk-tsk, oh my, please don’t do that. Just a friendly reminder. But those reminders tend to get your back up.

  Yeah, I tell her, in my head. You want to let that twitch of annoyance ride. You want to hold to the truth of what people say, not to the reason they say it. Or something like that. I heard this on the radio.

  I find the freeze-dried but not the Advil. I zap a mug of water in the microwave and stir in the coffee. Then I dry-swallow some Dexedrine.

  Mom doesn’t blink. She never does.

  It’s a pretty nice photograph, a snapshot taken by one of my cousins at some family reunion or wedding; maybe it was a funeral, I don’t know. I never went to those things when Mom was alive, and I don’t go to them now. Maybe I don’t want to end up in a photograph on somebody’s mantelpiece. A strange kind of shadow hooks down into her cheek, but still, it’s nice. She’s smiling, and I like that.

  The newspaper says VIRGINIA HANDGUN LIMIT LOOKS UNSTOPPABLE. But that’s page three. To get there, I’ve read about the new income tax increase, the new fuel tax increase, the new cigarette tax increase, the new prime interest rate increase, and the new dead bodies over in D.C., thirteen of them in this particular twenty-four-hour go-round. The Reverend Gideon Parks has called for a prayer vigil on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but the Mayor doesn’t want prayers, he wants more cops. I’ve finished the first cup of coffee and started on the second by the time Fiona wanders in, dropping a pair of high heels to the floor and mounting up, all the while pulling a brush through that long and curly-kinky hair.

  Hi, Mom, she says. Reminding me that it’s not really normal to hold conversations with photographs.

  Damn if she doesn’t look nice this morning. Silk blouse. Those jeans have got her butt up and she’s doing that thing with the eyeliner again.

  Her name is Ellen. About everyone she knows calls her that, although on occasion one of her girlfriends will call her Elfie.

  I call her Fiona. I don’t know why. Maybe I just like the name.

  She has mud-brown eyes and this little smile that says she knows your number. And she does. She looks good in anything, better without.

  I got my period, she says.

  What do you say to that? Sorry? Congratulations? I drink my coffee instead.

  I said—

  Heard you, I tell her.

  She tosses the hairbrush down, sweeps her purse and car keys from the Formica counter, gives my forehead an aunt’s kiss, and tells me not to forget the dishes and that we’re short of milk. Then:

  Bye.

  It’s Tuesday, the last week of April. Fiona works Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at the Vachon Hair Salon in Rosslyn, right across the river from Georgetown. She does manicures, nail designs. Fridays she leaves work at noon and doesn’t come home until Sunday, just in time for 60 Minutes. I don’t know what she does when she’s away. She’s never told me, and I’ve never asked. Things are easier that way.

  I started to follow her one time. I don’t know what got into me. Boredom, maybe, or one of those men things: property, territory, mine mine mine. I borrowed a company car, a beat-up station wagon that was less obvious than dirt, and tailed her silver CRX and its JAZZERCISE bumper sticker all the way up the GW Parkway to the Chain Bridge. Right about there I felt like one sorry jerk, and I turned the wagon toward Tysons Corner on Route 123. Drove out to Bloomingdale’s and bought her some perfume, little ounce of Cartier Panthère that cost over a hundred bucks. Buying off shame does not come cheap.

  I don’t tell her my secrets, so why should she tell me hers? Things like that have to work both ways, or they don’t work at all.

  That Sunday night, while Morley Safer tried to speak wisely with some withered refugee from Afghanistan, I handed her the perfume and she told me that I shouldn’t have done it and all that, but she smiled.

  Fiona smiles a lot. She’s the happiest person I know. Her voice is like whiskey, rough and smooth all at once. So are her kisses.

  When I wake up in the night, sometimes she’s holding on to me.

  little games

  You should know right now, if you haven’t figured it out yet, that I’m not the good guy.

  The name is Burdon: Burdon Lane. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in Jewish Hospital, though it was the doctors, not the parents, who were Jewish. Grew up somewhere else—in southern Illinois—which pretty much sums up my childhood: It was there but now it’s somewhere else. It was the fifties, so that makes me—what? Forty-going-on-old. Brown hair, blue eyes. Six feet and some tall, one hundred eighty pounds. Social Security Number? Yeah, I got one. Actually, I got more than one.

  Here’s my ad in the PERSONALS section: SWM, mid-40s, divorced, no kids, ISO guns. Big guns, little guns. Handguns, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and, yeah, okay, grenade launchers and antitank weapons here and there along the way. Then again, here’s my card: Burdon Lane. Executive Vice President. UniArms, Incorporated.

  I’m a businessman, and tucked in the inside chest pocket of my suit coat, the grey linen three-button off-the-rack job, is the reason I met with Renny Two Hand last night: a key, the kind of key you see on most everyone’s key chain, the kind of key that fits the front door or the office door or the mailbox at the apartment.

  This particular key fits into a padlock. The padlock hangs on the door of a self-storage rental unit on the third floor of Moving Vault on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria. Inside the rental unit is a stack of boxes whose contents, for the most part, are noted on the sides of the cartons in blue Magic Marker. Inside the third box from the bottom, marked DEHUMIDIFIER/BABY CLOTHES/CARRY-ON BAG, are a dehumidifier, baby clothes, and … a grey Samsonite carry-on bag.

  On Thursday I will visit the storage unit and I will take a grey Samsonite carry-on bag with me. I will open the third cardboard box. I will put my carry-on bag, which is empty, inside the box and I will leave with the carry-on bag from the box. I will drive to the Huntington Metro Station and park in the open-air lot. I will board the Metro, ride the Yellow Line to Gallery Place, where I will change to the Red Line and ride on to Union Station. There I will board Amtrak Train 120, a Metroliner departing at 4:00 p.m., and I will have a cup of coffee and read my book for a couple hours until I reach 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. There I will disembark from the train and I will take a taxicab to a fine seafood restaurant called Bookbinder’s, a very busy, hectic place on Walnut between Second and Front, where, still wearing my sunglasses, I will give my raincoat and my carry-on bag to the coat-check girl and I will receive a plastic chit in return, round, with a hole for a hanger and an identifying number embossed in gold. I will meet an old girlfriend of mine, a classified ad supervisor for the Philadelphia Inquirer named Lauren Auster, at the bar, and we will have drinks and we will tell stories, some old and some new, and we will laugh, and after a time we will move to a table and we will order shrimp cocktail and Caesar salad and the scrod, with mine blackened and hers grilled in light butter and dill, and at 7:15 p.m. I will put my napkin to my lips and I will announce the need to visit the men’s room. There I will enter the second stall, waiting for my turn if I have to, and I will drop my pants and I will have a seat and I will do my business. I will open a package of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and I will chew one piece until the flavor is gone. I will take the plastic chit from my pocket and I will take the gum from my mouth and I will press the gum to the chit and then stick the chit to the wall behind the toilet. I will roll off some paper, dry my hands, flush the toilet, and buckle up. I will walk back to my table, finish the scrod, have a Martell Cordon Bleu, have a cup of coffee,and when the tab arrives I will pay with cash and leave a decent tip, and before eight I will leave with my arm around Lauren and she will finish telling me about her latest boyfriend and we will share a kiss and a hug and then we will find our sep
arate ways home. Which means that I will take a taxicab back to 30th Street Station and catch Amtrak Train 127, the last southbound Metroliner of the day, which departs at 8:14 p.m.

  While I ride the rails back to Washington, reading my book, another diner will pay his tab at Bookbinder’s and as he leaves he will present his chit to the coat-check girl and he will recover his raincoat and his grey Samsonite carry-on bag, and later, when he finds himself at home, he will open the bag. Inside the bag will be a large swatch of chamois, folded neatly into a bundle and secured by string. Inside the chamois will be a pair of new, nicely customized machine pistols, Heckler & Koch MP-5Ks with clean serial numbers, which he will use or he will sell or he will give away or he will mount proudly upon the wall of his den or his office. I don’t much care because we’ve already been paid.

  Yeah, I’m a businessman. That’s what Jules Berenger told me, those twelve, thirteen, however many years ago when we sat down to breakfast at the Huddle House on Little River Turnpike and had our long chat over orange juice, pancakes, eggs over easy, and lots of black coffee, before I shook hands with him and signed on, before I became one of the boys. A gunrunner.

  Now that wasn’t the job description or the title. Actually I became a marketing representative for VisionWorks, an up-and-coming computer software firm. A few years later I became a senior marketing representative for BioInsights, an up-and-coming medical research facility. Then I became a marketing manager for Line One, an up-and-coming telephone services reseller. Jules owns all these companies, or at least a piece of them, and their clients require a great deal of marketing effort and thus a lot of travel, in-country and out.

  Sooner or later, like any upwardly mobile young urban professional who knows his job and gets it done, I became a senior marketing manager for the real deal, UniArms of Alexandria, Virginia—the small arms capital of the free world. I never once looked back, and why should I?

  I’m living the American Dream: Nice house, nice lawn, nice car; there’s no wife, no kids, but what the hell, there’s Fiona. I’m drawing down a hundred thousand on the books, with payroll stubs and W-2 forms to prove it. Pay my taxes, too, fucking twenty-eight percent a year and growing with each new smiling Democrat that they put in the White House. Then the state takes … what? Five and three-quarters. The city gets half a point, too, not to mention the real estate tax and the personal property tax and now this goddamn recycling tax. Then there’s the sales tax. Once you pay the monthly hit for your mortgage, your car loan, your phone bill, electricity, gas, water, insurance, cable TV, and then the credit cards, what have you got? Nothing. Everybody owns a piece of you: the bank, MasterCard and VISA, and most of all the politicians.

  Like I said, it’s the American Dream.

  So I’m a businessman. I buy and sell commodities on the open market, not to mention the occasional closed one. That those commodities have calibers or gauges and muzzle velocities doesn’t mean much to the business. Pickups and deliveries can, on occasion, be a bitch. Suppliers, the good ones, the smart ones, do business. They can’t afford to screw around. Customers are another story.

  Here’s how it works:

  People need guns. But people can’t get guns. At least not all the people, not all the time. Which seems a bit strange, since there is one firearm out there for every man, woman, and child in America.

  So let’s say you want to buy an AMT Hardballer, a cheap .45 with crappy metallurgy that kicks like a bitch; I’d recommend the long slide auto for better accuracy, probably cost you only twenty-five dollars more. But you have to be able to buy the Hardballer first.

  If you live in New York City, forget about it. You can’t own a handgun. That’s the law. You need a permit, and unless you have big money or big balls, forget even filing an application. But if you live in, let’s say, Texas City, well, you can grab hold of one of those babies and snap in the seven-round magazine on the very same day if you want.

  Maybe. You do have to fill out this sheet that the Feds call Form 4473, and let them run a background check. And unless you choose to lie, an offense punishable by several years of incarceration, you will have to tell about that arrest and that conviction and that mental problem. Unless you choose to lie.

  So here you are, deprived of a necessity of life by the law, the law, the law; here a law, there a law, everywhere a law-law.

  Let me try to explain this thing.

  These Founding Father guys, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, whoever, the guys on the dollar bills, they kick the British guys out and they start themselves a new government. Their own government. So what’s the first thing they do? They make up rules. The Constitution, for starters. That’s a good one: All men are created equal, right? Bullshit then, bullshit now. These guys owned slaves, their women didn’t vote, so who were they kidding? Well, nobody. But since they were the guys who wrote the rules, they wrote them just the way they wanted.

  So then somebody says: Hey, we fucked up. Wrote this Constitution thing but we forgot a bunch of stuff. We need to write these Amendments to sort of list the stuff we left out. So now there’s another set of rules, this thing they call the Bill of Rights, and there in big print is the Second Amendment. Not the first, not the last, and not even in the middle, but second, number two, meaning it’s almost at the top of the list. Which is to say, it’s important.

  This Second Amendment thing says you’ve got the right to bear arms. Looks clear as window glass to me. But the First Amendment, the one at the very top of that list, says you’ve got the freedom of speech. Tell that to the teacher who wants to read the Bible in class. Tell that to the video store that wants to rent you some X-rated movies. Tell that to my Aunt Eustacia. She wanted to put this sign that said PRAY FOR PEACE in her front yard during the Gulf War, and the city made her take it down.

  In other words, these Founding Father guys, they wrote this Bill of Rights, but they didn’t really mean what they said. They just said these things because they sounded like good ideas at the time, but once these guys died, and the next guys were in, the ones who didn’t write the rules but sure wished they had—well, they got busy rewriting those rules.

  So they tell us that the Founding Father guys didn’t really mean we’ve got the right to bear arms, and they sure didn’t mean we’ve got the right to buy arms. What we’ve got is the right to have some sorry-ass politicians tell us whether we can bear arms, and when and where and what kind of arms we can bear, if we can fill out the right forms and wait long enough. Somebody ought to sit down and rewrite that Amendment to make all that clear.

  Meantime, if you want to bear arms, fuck the law: You just need cash. Not a lot. If you’ve got some green, then there’s always somebody like me, somebody who knows somebody else, and they can get you whatever you want. You want a gun—and not just any gun, let’s say a clean gun with clean ammo—I can get you one inside an hour. Or take Charlie Hardin out of Roanoke. You want a more exotic weapon, the guy can get it for you, seven-day turnaround max. The weirder the better: One time Charlie pulled a Belgian .223 Minimi belt-fed light squad auto machine gun for me, and it was like going to the catalog counter at Sears. Saw him on a Friday, paid one half down in cash, picked that baby up on Monday. Sold it that night for a two hundred percent markup.

  Like I said, it’s the American Dream.

  stay the same

  Ch-ch-ch-changes.

  On Wednesday I’m standing in the 7-Eleven, trying to decide between Snapple Mint Tea and a Bud Light, when my pager beeps. Good timing. It’s ten-thirty in the morning and I really don’t need a drink, not yet. So I go for the Snapple and check the number on the pager while I’m waiting in line to pay.

  Bingo.

  Sometimes—not often, but every once in a while, before the memory of the last one has faded entirely—the pager gets you at the perfect moment, the one that reminds you that maybe, just maybe, you’re working for Domino’s Pizza and you’re about the best-paid delivery boy on the block.

  I trade two bucks
for the Snapple, give the change to Jerry’s Kids, and wander out front to the pay phone—only a fool would use a cellular for business—and I look over at the dry cleaner that’s next to the 7-Eleven while I make the call, not to the number that’s showing on the pager, but to this week’s number, probably another pay phone, probably in some other parking lot of some other 7-Eleven just down the way from some other dry cleaner, and on the second ring somebody picks up and says:

  Hey.

  Yeah, I tell him.

  Need you, baby.

  Somewhere between the need and the you, I know it’s CK; that little nasal twang seeps on through no matter what he has to say. And what CK has to say next is:

  Lunch.

  Okay, I tell him.

  Twelve-thirty.

  Yeah, I tell him.

  The usual place.

  Shit, I tell him.

  Click.

  Click.

  So there goes the afternoon, probably the evening, and maybe even the rest of the week; but what the hell: To make it in this business, you’ve got to like change. Only dead things stay the same.

  The rules to this game are simple: They’re our rules. We make them up as we go, and if we don’t, somebody else is going to make them up for us. Sort of like that Constitution thing. And since I like to play by my own set of rules, I like to make them and, every once in a while, to break them.

  I drop down Quaker Lane to the Interstate and head south. There’s more than an hour to kill and I may as well kill it in style. Today I’m driving the metallic-blue Corsica, about the most forgettable car on the road, and when I find a parking space at the strip mall off Little River Turnpike, I settle in behind the wheel and read my book. Every so often, I lamp the entrance to the Greek Gourmet, which Lukas, the loser who’s supposed to be bird-dogging this place, swears to Sunday is on the up-and-up, but Lukas has a bit too much religion. Me, I’ve never been a believer.