by Jesse West
They struggled with the gun together. Jack pulled and tugged till the he got Bobby on his back on the ground. He then got to his knees and continued to struggle for the gun with Bobby. He lifted his leg over Bobby till he was on one knee he held the gun in both his hands along with both of Bobby’s hands. He pulled on it till Bobby’s arms were straight and pulled back on them towards his leg, Bobby’s elbow making contact with his knee with so much force that he had no choice but to let go with that hand. Jack took advantage and separated his arm that still had its hold on the gun and he laid it flat on the floor. With his other arm, he sent two hard, dominating elbow strikes down directly onto Bobby’s face. He spun the gun out of his other hand, it was a bit easier being that was the hand with the finger that was half missing so his grip wasn’t as strong as it could’ve been. He then took the gun, sat up, and hit Bobby across the face with the barrel of the gun.
He then mounted Bobby and began hammering on his face with the butt end of the gun repeatedly. One hit after another, flashbacks of him watching him slap around and beat his mother ran through his head. Every hit he could count in his memory, he was returning to Bobby. Every hit ran waves of emotions through Jack’s spine.
Five hits.
Six hits.
Bobby tried reaching up to stop him but Jack shoved his hands out of the way and continued.
Seven hits.
Eight hits.
Bobby tried to speak but Jack wasn’t listening.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
Thud after thud.
Twelve.
Thirteen.
The sound the gun made against his skull made the adults cringe. The girls held their ears as they sat in the corner. Jimmy flinched every time he heard it.
Only one voice was heard at this point which stopped Jack from hitting Bobby.
“STOP IT, JACKIE!”
Jack turned with the gun in the air. He knew that voice. It was his mother.
Shocked, Jack stared at her. Madness in his eyes. His mother became quiet again. She saw nothing in her boy’s eyes. Nothing but hatred.
Jack lowered his arm and turned back to Bobby. He looked at him, saw his bruising, his cuts from the metal, he was bleeding all over. Jack was breathing heavily. Bobby laid there, barely able to move. His eye was already swelling up. Jack looked at him and he knew….he wasn’t finished.
“You know, Bobby,” he said to him “All my life…I’ve wanted to put you like this. All my life….I’ve wanted to beat you to an inch of death……then leave you alive…so you’ll know…that I held your life…in my hands” he leaned down and got in Bobby’s face “…and I gave it back to you.”
Everyone in the other room sat with their heads down as they listened to what Jack was saying. He sat back upright and the noise of the gun cocking brought everyone’s attention to them.
“But I’m not letting you walk away from this…unscathed.” he lifted his foot and put it down on Bobby’s right arm to stop him from moving. He reached over and grabbed his left hand by the wrist. The hand with the missing finger.
“I’ve been haunted by this hand…for years.” Jack said to him. He then put his hand flat on the floor. “I will not allow it to bother me…” he put the gun to his palm and aimed it sideways, pointing in the directions of his fingers. “…anymore.”
“JACKIE, NO!” his mother shouted, but it was too late.
Jack let a round off, blowing two of Bobby’s fingers and knuckles off completely due to the angle. He heard the screams from the other room but it didn’t bother him. He had his revenge on Bobby.
Neighbors
Something Jack didn’t take into consideration over the course of the last couple hours, was that he was in a house in the middle of Bath Beach Brooklyn. He wasn’t isolated from other people and he wasn’t attempting to keep things down so other people wouldn’t take notice of what was going on in the house. Perhaps he assumed no one would be around seeing it was Thanksgiving, but he was wrong with this assumption and more wrong to not take into consideration what kind of neighbors he was dealing with.
He knew Pauline was the nosy type and she would gossip about everyone on their block, as older people do, whether it was with them or about them. As long as you see one of the people on the block doing it, you have to assume that everyone on the block does it.
No one in a neighborhood like this leaves their neighbors alone. They all know everyone’s kids, what everyone is doing for holiday decorations, when people are in the hospital, when families are arguing, and they know everyone’s dirty laundry. The kind of neighbors that don’t mind their own business and need to know everyone else’s.
The house that Jack was in was numbered 288. Directly next door at 286 lived an older couple. Joyce and Rolando Bipta. Joyce was close friends with Pauline since they were neighbors. She’d come over some Sunday’s after dinner and have coffee with them. They would sit and talk about recipes, their soap operas, and the people who lived across the street who neither of them liked. They were a retired couple just maintaining their home and enjoying whatever years they had left. Like most people their age, they had a lot of time on their hands and what better activity to spend time on then worrying about what your neighbors are doing. Joyce was always curious to what was happening on her block and Rolando couldn’t care less. He would listen to her rant on and on about this neighbor and that neighbor. Part of Rolando didn’t mind hearing it but sometimes he would get annoyed.
Most years, they went upstate to Joyce’s sister’s house for the holidays. Unfortunately, this year they stood home and Joyce kept her eyes and ears to the window ever since Jack got there.
At the beginning of the night, Joyce and Rolando sat down for dinner. They enjoyed staying home this year and not worrying about traveling all the way to her sister’s house in the Hamptons. After dinner, they sat down together and put on their favorite holiday movie, It’s A Wonderful Life. As they began watching the movie, they could hear their neighbors, the Viccaro’s, talking and laughing very loudly. Being their living room window was close to the Viccaro’s dining room window, you could hear just about everything. Jack didn’t think about this when he pulled at earlier.
When things began to unfold, Joyce noticed that the loud, happy chatter dimmed down to almost nothing.
“They stopped celebrating over there I guess.” She looked at Rolando and said as she sat on the couch “That’s unlike Pauline.”
For people like Joyce, this made her quite curious.
“Joyce, come on.” Her husband said “Just leave them alone and let’s watch the movie and go to bed, alright?”
She nodded her head in agreement but she kept thinking about it, turning her head towards the window. She got up at one point so she could hold open the curtain a little bit and looked across into the other house. She saw them all sitting at the table, nothing seemed wrong. So, she went back to her couch and didn’t pay any attention to it though in the back of her head, the curiosity never stopped.
In the house, this was the point where Jack first arrived. They went through their hellos and Jack started his rant, pulled the gun then tied everyone up.
Joyce and Rolando were just sitting on their couch watching the movie as this was happening, but Joyce kept thinking about how quiet it was and how weird it was to her that it was so quiet.
As the film was reaching its end, she heard them yelling now from across the street.
In the house, this was the point when Jimmy picked up the gun and everyone was telling him to shoot Jack.
Joyce heard a few bursts of shouting up to now but this didn’t sit well to her. She sprung up and darted towards her window. Rolando sat on the couch and put his hand to his head in disbelief.
“Why can’t you leave them alone, Joyce?” he proclaimed to her.
“They are yelling over there.” She said “First they got quiet, then they start yelling, then they are quiet, and now their yelling again.” She p
eeked across to the dining room window and saw that their curtains were closed this time. She couldn’t see in.
“Dammit.” She said and turned to her husband “The curtains are closed.”
“They probably saw you starring at them. Stop stalking our neighbors and come sit down.” He told her.
“This doesn’t bother you at all?” she asked him.
“No.” He replied with confidence.
Joyce was reluctant as she looked out the window again to make sure she couldn’t see anything. She eventually went back to the couch when she knew there was nothing to see.
Throughout the next hour, she heard bursts of one voice shouting, then many voices, then one voice, then many. She was able to tell since she knew what her neighbors sounded like, especially the Viccaro’s.
This was around the time where Sal was discovering the secret about his parents and the money they held from him, Jack had put the gun to Sue’s head, the kids with shouting, and Gene was yelling when Jack was going to hit Sal. Jack went through his rants around this time frame as well. Even though she couldn’t tell voices, she was still able to hear them.
The movie had ended when Joyce began cleaning off their coffee table. She picked up Rolando’s coffee mug and the plate that had a few cookies on it they were eating during the movie when she heard a loud crash from the house. This was when Jack and Bobby were fighting and they knocked over the case of dishes. It startled her as she almost dropped the mug on the floor. Rolando sprang up from his laid back position to make sure she was ok.
“Whoa whoa whoa, what happened? You alright, babe?” he said holding her arm by the elbow gently, as if to ease her to place the plate down and not drop it.
“Did you hear that?” She said looking at the window.
“Hear what?” he asked.
“It sounded like shattering glass,” she said with curiosity in her voice. He detected this and tried to defuse it immediately.
“Oh, they probably dropped a few plates. Stop bothering over it.” He took the plate and the mug from her and stood up to go to the kitchen himself.
“I don’t know, Rolly.” Her nickname for him all the years they were married. “I feel like something’s wrong.” She went back over to the window and opened the curtain to try and see in. Still nothing.
“No, you don’t.” he starting walking into the kitchen then he stopped and turned to speak to her, she looked up away from the window “You want there to be something wrong so it’s something for you to talk about with your girlfriends. Leave them alone.”
As Rolando said this, there was another loud scream from the house. They both heard it this time. It was the scream that Jack heard from his mother that stopped him from beating on Bobby with the pistol.
Rolando froze in sentence as Joyce spun back around to try and see something.
“You heard that?!” she said in a whispering voice.
Rolando hesitated for a second but he snapped himself out of it and continued to walk into the kitchen.
“It’s probably nothing.” he said “See, now you got me thinking that something’s wrong-“ he was stopped in mid-sentence when they both heard another loud scream and what was unmistakably a gunshot. The shot that took Bobby’s fingers.
Joyce flinched and stepped back away from the window. Rolando couldn’t help but freeze in place to the sound. His body flinched to it and he dropped the plate on the floor. The shattering of the plate caused Joyce to turn to him with her hand on her mouth. She couldn’t believe it. Rolando turned to her, his facial expression had dropped.
He couldn’t deny it. That was a gun shot.
There was no trying to think it’s something else and no trying to say that she’s just being nosy. Something was going on in that house.
Without a word, Joyce picked up the phone and dialed 911.
“Hello? Yes, please listen to me. My name is Joyce Bipta. I live at 286 Bay 14th street Brooklyn. I think I just heard a gunshot coming from the house next door. The number is 288 Bay 14th. Their name is Viccaro. I’ve been hearing a lot of yelling and screaming all night and I feel like something horrible is happening over there right now.”
New family
After 2 full years of dealing with Bobby and his mother on his own, Jack rejoiced the day he was told the news his sister was moving back.
Emily had gone to live with her father when she was 11. Jack was 7 at the time and he got used to not having her around since he knew she loved spending the time with her dad that she never got before. He was extremely upset when they said she was leaving because he was not prepared for that but she made sure to call him every so often to make sure he was ok. She was having a tough time staying there and thought it would be best if she left her father for a while.
Jack waited for her by the door the day she was supposed to come, he was jittery with excitement. When she finally got there, he was unsure what to do. She walked in with a huge smile on her face and Jack ran to her with opened arms. They squeezed each other so tightly they almost turned blue.
She was 15 now and she had grown a lot since the last time he saw her. Her hair looked like it was tied to her head. Jack found it weird but he didn’t know what it was like to have braid-able hair, they always buzzed his hair down. She had a lot of bracelets on one arm and her pants were 3 times bigger than they should’ve been. Jack didn’t know much about style or fitting in, he was happy when he got through a whole day with only one kid saying something about his cheap sneakers or his bad haircut that his mother gave him.
“Why are your pants so big?” he asked her.
“It’s the style. Don’t worry, you’ll get it when you’re older,” was all she said about it.
Jack didn’t care about the pants, he was happy to have his sister back. He was worried about when the first fight would happen. He expressed to her a bit later that day when they were alone. The drinking, the fighting, the yelling, and she was more than prepared to deal with it when it happened. She was old enough to handle things and take care of Jack.
At the time, Jeanette was unemployed and she sat at home for the most part. Sometimes being productive and others just doing nothing. Bobby was working pretty much anywhere he could get work. Construction, plumbing, landscaping, and numerous other odd jobs whether it was for family members, neighbors, or for independently owned companies that would hire him. His temper didn’t go over well with most places so he was mostly self-employed. They worked hard to pay the bills and somehow keep their apartment for as long as they did which surprised Jack a lot since they seemed to be a poor family. Jack was still relatively young so he didn’t really understand much about responsibility or how bills and rent work but he did know that most of their money wasn’t going towards things for the home or him, more of it was going to their secret habits they thought Jack never knew about. He knew better and he hated that they acted like he was stupid but he just kept his chin up and kept moving forward.
It had died down a bit in the past few weeks before Emily came back. What was once fighting every other day became every other week and now it was only once or twice a month but each of those fights were the worst thing Jack was witnessed to out of all the times he saw them fight. Each fight got worse and worse. He told Emily that he once saw Bobby rip the wall mounted phone out of the wall and throw it so hard across the room it shattered into pieces. Every fight got worse for Jack and having Emily here gave him a sense of protection.
This was also around the time when Jack noticed Bobby and his mother were getting more serious with their relationship. He had moved into the apartment with them, she had already met his family, and they were bringing Jack to meet them soon. Now that Emily was with him, they could go through this together.
The first few times they were invited over for dinner weren’t bad. Jeanette seemed to get along with them very well. Emily and Jack kept to themselves mostly but Vicky wanted to be Emily’s friend badly and she tried hard but Emily was a lot older then a lot of the kids.
Jack was closer to their age which is why he was able to get close with them. He himself was getting old mentally from how his life had been up to this point.
Here he was, an 11 year old whose father was in prison, his sister had gone through changes into her teenage years, his mother’s boyfriend was an abusive drunk, and his mother seemed oblivious to everything. She never saw anything wrong with Bobby hitting her. All she did was give him dirty looks and entice him more, and he hated that. Jack felt older than he should’ve been but he embraced it, kept his chin up, and dealt with whatever came next as best as he could.
Shortly after Emily came back and they both went through the formalities of meeting their new pseudo family, Jack’s biggest fear came to life sooner than he thought. Emily had finally experienced one of their fights.
One night, Bobby and Jeanette figured that with Emily being 15 she could stay and watch Jack and they could go out for the night. Emily saw no issue with this but Jack was nervous. He wasn’t sure if they would come back happy like they do sometimes or if it was going to be a bad night. They watched a couple movies and played some card games while they were out. Jack loved having his sister back, though he could tell she was a bit different he didn’t care.
They were sitting in the living together when eventually they heard someone come home. Jack was closest to the door so he looked into the hallway and saw what looked like his mother storm into the apartment, slam the door, stomp her way into the other room and slam the door behind her. Emily stood up from floor and began walking into the hallway.
“What just happened out here?” she said as she was approaching he hallway but was stopped by Jack. He reached out and grabbed her hand to stop her in place since he knew what was coming next.