Prodigal Blues

by Gary A Braunbeck

  He made a fist with his right hand and began hitting the steering wheel, the dashboard, the roof above him. "NO MORE NO MORE NO MORE NO MOOOOOOOOORE! And you know what I did? I took that beautiful bone saw—God it was the most perfect thing under heaven there in my hand—and I stepped forward and swung it up in this smooth arc and just buried it right in Grendel's kneecap, and he screamed and spun around and fired off a shot, but the shot, it went wild—that gave me enough time to cut one of Thomas's straps, and once his hand was free it came up and he grabbed Grendel's nuts and started squeezing like a vice, then Arnold snatched one of the Mason jars—it had a uterus in it—and he heaved that thing straight and hard right into the back of Grendel's head and it shattered but the thing is, Grendel still hadn't dropped the gun, so I went for his hand with the saw and he got off another shot that went right through the meat of Rebecca's right shoulder and she dropped the torch and poor Thomas's pants and shirt caught fire because what none of us had noticed was that the jar with the had been filled with alcohol, and when it shattered, most of it had splattered onto Thomas's face and clothes but we couldn't do anything right then because Grendel had the gun, so I took the saw and hit his collar and then I stripped a chunk out of his bicep and then rammed it right into the middle of his hand and he threw back his head and screamed and dropped the gun and there was blood all over him, all over me, it was on the floor and all over our shoes—we started slipping around like a couple of dancing partners and when we went down, we hit the concrete hard and it hurt—Christ! it hurt—but as soon as we hit he grabbed my throat with his good hand and dug in his nails and tried to crush my windpipe but Rebecca, she had his gun now and she didn't even bother aiming, she just pushed it right between his balls and his asshole and blew the whole works all over the floor—Grendel screamed like I'd never heard anyone scream, he was spitting blood and foam and I swear to Christ, I'll swear on a stack of Bibles, until the day I die I'll swear that his eyes turned into two bright red burning coals right before he shuddered and squittered shit and piss out of what was left down there and then passed out."

  We were at 90 and the bus was beginning to shudder and swerve; people looked out in shock as we blasted past them.

  "Thomas's face, all those burns on him—it was our fault, we just—Jesus, we just wanted to kill Grendel so much none of us even thought about what was in the jars—and Thomas, he can't pull himself off that table and run for the sink because his other arm and his chest are still strapped down"—

  —93…94—

  —"Christopher, please, you have to slow down, if you don't you're"—

  —"so I pull down this piece of tarp that's covering a crate of medical supplies and throw it on top of him and then all three of us are on top of him and patting down the tarp and there's smoke and the smell of burning flesh"—

  —"going to kill us, you're going to ram this thing into the side of a truck or"—

  —95…96—

  —"and Thomas is bucking and shaking and screaming again and… and"—

  —"make this fucking bus shake apart or lose control of the wheel and flip us about a thousand times"—

  —97—

  —"and it's all so… so unnecessary! Jesus, Mark, there was no need!"—

  —98—

  —"I'm begging you, Christopher, I'm—LOOK AT ME, WILL YOU? I'm BEGGING you to please"—

  —"No need for any of it, for things like Grendel to be walking around all safe and sound and sleeping so peacefully like some baby with a fresh soul"—

  —99—

  —the bus was shaking like some giant iron lizard having a seizure the wheel was rattling right off the column—

  —"SLOW DOWN!"—

  —"while there are kids like Thomas who have to apologize to monsters like it was them who'd done the wrong"—

  —I reached over and yanked the pistol from him and fired a shot into the roof, then one into the floor between my legs, then turned it on him—"SLOW DOWN RIGHT NOW OR I'LL SHOOT YOU AND"—and the sudden absurdity of what I was about to say hit me; if I shot him, he'd let go of the wheel, the bus would spin, the trailer would jackknife, we'd probably do about a dozen somersaults across all three lanes on this side, and there wouldn't be enough left of either of us to identify once the gas tank and ammonium-nitrate went up.

  This wasn't a threat I was making; it was the punchline to the dumbest fucking joke never told.

  I looked at the speedometer—

  —100—

  —and then Christopher looked at me, at the hole in the roof, the one in the floor, and the gun in my hand, and said: "What'd you do that for?"—

  —except the way that he said it, all softly and childlike and innocent, made me hear it as Let go of my Eggo; You got your chocolate in my peanut butter; Let's have Mikey try it, he hates everything, and because I heard that way, I did the only thing I could think of, the only thing that seemed right and normal and appropriate—

  —I started laughing.

  And couldn't stop.

  No matter how much I tried, I could not stop with the yuks and the giggles and the hardee-dee-har-har-hars; couldn't get control of the chuckles and the hoots; I doubled-up with the snickers and snorts, then tripled-up with the cackles, and by the time the chortles and guffaws came into it, I think I was actually beginning to implode; I howled with laugher; I quaked with mirth; I became almost transcendent with the sillies; I went through so many different types of laughter I accidentally invented new ones as the giddy violence of it spread fiery pain down my throat and flooded my eyes with tears and pulled all the oxygen from my lungs: I snuckled, I chorkled—I even guffortled—and now I was hearing lines from an unwritten Dr. Seuss book: "Little Markie Sieber laughed himself to death/He snickered and he snortled until his very last breath/People claim he yiggled, perhaps even chorkled/He most definitely higgled before he at last guffortled…." It was so great—we were about to die in a fiery crash of shattered glass and twisted metal and mangled bodies and I was laughing my ass off. I slammed a hand against my ribs because my heart was trying to sneak out like the coward it was but I wasn't having that, no. My stomach was ripping into bloody shreds under my skin and my lungs were shriveling up and I didn't care; Little Markie Sieber would laugh himself to death and that was fine by me.

  I don't know how long it took before the storm fizzled out, but when it was done I found myself half on the floor, half in my seat, kneeling face-first like a drunk heaving into a toilet, and everything inside my body was throbbing with pain.

  Then this voice started to penetrate the thick haze in my skull, it was saying something about finished and done and holes and—

  —I looked up at Christopher; he was sitting half-turned in his seat, looking down at me, arms crossed over the steering wheel, fingers drumming away. The bus wasn't shaking to pieces any longer. There wasn't going to be any spectacular Götterdammerung-ing on this road this morning—at least, not by us. When had we stopped moving, anyway? I looked around—insomuch as my eyes could focus—and saw that we'd pulled over into the emergency lane. Morning traffic was getting slightly heavier now. No one looked at us.

  I wiped my eyes and grinned up Christopher.

  "Are you finished?" he asked.

  "Why'd… why'd you… why'd you stop?" I pulled myself back into my seat, leaning my head back and holding my chest, gasping for air.

  He waited until I was settled before answering. "Oh, all kinds of reasons—it felt like this goddamn thing was about to crack apart… I think I hit a rabbit… the CD ended and it was time to change the tunes… but I suppose the biggest reason was that… well, gosh, my curiosity just got the best of me and I had to find out which part of the story you found SO FUCKING FUNNY!"

  His first punch broke my nose; his second one cracked a rib; he was getting ready to deliver a third when I pulled back my legs and kicked out squarely at the center of his chest, slamming him back against his door, then threw open my own door and stumbled out, losing my balance an
d falling back-first against the bus, and then Christopher came over my seat and grabbed at my shirt collar but I pulled away, hearing the material rip, and staggered toward the far end, and the next punch came so fast and hard that I was spun back against the bus before I had a chance to block his blow, and as I tried righting myself into a defensive position the second punch landed twice as hard as the last one, right in my stomach, and I doubled over, and the next punch crashed against the side of my mouth, bloodying it instantly and snapping me straight up; I tried to cover but the blows kept landing deep into my stomach and against the side of my head, then again to my head, again to my stomach and I was gasping because now the pain and the bleeding were getting very hard, blood streaming down from my mouth to my shirt and what saved me from being pummeled into unconsciousness right then and there was that I threw the most half-assed doofus-janitor hook and it landed but didn't seem to do any good and now here came a punch toward my eyes and I managed to lower my head in time for the blow to land on the top of my head and I thought I heard a couple of Christopher's knuckles pop ("You and that hard head of yours," Tanya always said) and that was good, that was great, but not great enough to stop his punches from triphammering into my stomach again.

  I could feel myself starting to black out, so I shook myself and lunged forward, punching Christopher in the neck and grabbing the back of his head so I could yank it forward and punch his eyes but it was slippery going because his eyes were wet but whether it was from tears or blood I couldn't tell and didn't care, by that time Christopher had regained his balance and was slamming me back against the bus as he launched into another attack.

  But not so fierce this time.

  I covered myself as best I could, taking the blows on the top of my head or on the sides of my arms until there were almost no more because Christopher was nearly punched out but that was too little too late, my eyes were starting to roll back into my head, I had to do something unexpected, something vicious, so I fell against him, grabbing him in a bear hug while trying to get my brain working again, and now Christopher's punches were weakening, almost no problem at all—

  —then my knees began to buckle.

  Christopher, his chest heaving, pushed me back toward the trailer, threw a roundhouse that went wild, landing against my ear and spinning me along the length of the Airstream, off-balance more than hurt this time, and when I faced him again I saw he was going for another roundhouse but this one you could see coming from a mile away in slow-motion like something in a Peckinpah movie, and I knew I should have been able to duck it but my brain and body were not just then on speaking terms because the punch landed, landed hard, exploding against my jaw. I fell back helpless as Christopher staggered toward me, slamming me in the ribs as best he could and there was no doubt in my mind that this wasn't him, he just hadn't been taking his medication—that's what I told myself, to make it seem like a noble thing I was doing here, getting my ass kicked and telling myself the reason I wasn't fighting back was because this wasn't really his fault—then I decided that was bullshit and swung out and caught him in his good jaw and he staggered back, took a breath, and struck me again.

  Another punch to the mouth.

  I countered with a sharp elbow-jab to the throat.

  Another punch to the stomach.

  I countered with a hard heel to the instep.

  Another blow to the mouth.

  Again my eyes started to roll back.

  Christopher made his hand into a fist and his arm into a club and pulled back far and hard and I just had this sneaking suspicion that this next blow was going to ram my jawbone up into my brain—

  —then I saw, of all things, Denise's face, the way she'd looked sitting in the truck stop and craning to get to the straw in the glass of orange juice, and I saw the fear and sadness and confusion there, and remembered how the rest of them had looked when the masks were off and decided there was no way in hell I was going to spend the next four hours repairing Christopher's makeup after this—

  —and with everything I had remaining I drew back my right leg and snap-kicked out as hard as I could, catching Christopher, coming in, square between the legs.

  Another punch to the mouth from him.

  I slid down to the asphalt.

  Christopher drew back for another punch but that's when his brain and body shouted Got something you need to know about and the pain between his legs registered and he groaned as his hand clutched his groin and the whole tight, skinny mass of him slammed down across from me, the two of us side by side not two feet apart, gasping, groaning, covered in sweat, covered in road grime, covered in blood. We stared at each other, neither one able to move much, but that didn't stop Christopher, he struck out at my face again, catching only the edge of my jaw but it hurt enough, so I hit back, right in his eye, and we both wobbled, groaning, before he tried again, but there wasn't as much behind it this time, it was more of a slap, as was my response, and the whole thing quickly degenerated into two grown men sitting on the side of highway with all four hands flailing in the air and only occasionally connecting: "Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake" on goofballs. As if simultaneously realizing we were having what my mom would have called "a girlie fight", we suddenly stopped and looked at one another.

  Then Christopher slapped me. Once. Very hard.

  I slapped him right back. Once. Harder.

  He turned around, facing the grassy incline off the emergency lane, crossing his arms over his chest.

  I also turned around but did not cross my arms; it seemed the wrong aesthetic choice.

  A minute passed. Then another one. The whole time we just sat there, softly groaning and touching our wounds and listening to the sounds of the morning traffic whizzing past. I wasn't worried about anyone stopping. We were invisible.

  I leaned back my head against the trailer, gulped in some air, then turned to look at Christopher.

  His eyes were closed and he was softly but steadily banging the back of his skull against the trailer.

  "Well," I finally said. "That was certainly… baroque."

  "I don't like being laughed at."

  "I wasn't laughing at you or your story, Christopher—but thanks for thinking that I would at this point."

  "And I was supposed to know that how, exactly? By the way—did I skip a groove or did you almost threaten to shoot me?"

  "Almost, not quite."

  "Ah." He wiped some blood from his lower lips, looked at it, wiped it on his sleeve, then sniffed and said: "May I have my gun back, please?"

  "Well, since you said 'please'…" I patted myself down, then realized what I was doing. "I seem to have dropped it."

  We both looked toward the front end of the bus where the gun lay next to one of the tires.

  "Somebody really needs to go and get that thing before someone notices."

  "Yeah," agreed Christopher. "That would be… ouch!… that would be the thing a smart person would do."

  So we sat there. Vladimir and Estragon as they waited for Godot had nothing on us.

  "What did you think you'd accomplish by shooting holes in the roof and floor?" asked Christopher.

  "I was trying to get your attention."

  "Ah."

  I rubbed my jaw, wiped some of the muck from my face, then snorted back a big and very painful wad of blood and snot. "You need to take your medicine, Christopher."

  He pulled his legs back, groaning. "I know."

  "Is that what's in that pill bottle you keep taking out of your pocket and looking at?'

  "Yes."

  "I figured. How long has it been since you last took a dose?"

  "About four minutes—I took it while you were still having your little… Looney Tunes episode back there in the bus."

  "How long had it been before that?"

  He shrugged. "Four, maybe five days." He rubbed his eyes. "The thing is, you have to keep a consistent level of the stuff in your system at all times, right? If you stop, then what's in there only stays active fo
r about seventy-two hours before it starts to fizzle out." He sighed, then looked at me. "I took a double dose—that's what I'm supposed to do if this happens and I get… get…"