Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  I know he has it. I saw one of the linebackers give it to him to give to me.

  I look up and he’s freezing on me. Worried the whole deal will change, but not sure how it would.

  I say, “Slide the gun down into that little holder on the door by your foot, and then get out that door, shut it, and get in the other car.”

  I see it parked a few spaces down from me. Glasses’s wearing sunglasses now, looking out at the orange morning over the sea, arm out the window.

  Lil Tricky does what I ask. When I see the gun come out, I’m relieved it’s got a silencer on it. There was a time when all I ever wanted was to go out with a bang, but now I just want to slide out without anybody noticing.

  Before he goes, he says, “What you did tonight? Damn.”

  It’s one word, that last one, but it’s respect. Lil Tricky’s eyes are all big and he’s smiling. He doesn’t mean getting interrupted and tied up and robbed. He means me busting all those safes, and I’m actually glad that’s what’s sticking with him instead.

  With that, the door closes and he’s gone. I watch him get in the other car.

  I don’t take the gun from where it is. I get out my prepaid because there’s something I need to do.

  I close my eyes. I take a fast, big inhale and get oranges on top of oranges. Up my nose. Down into my lungs. And then I call Stenberg Locksmithing because I know it’s not open yet.

  There’s no possible way Laura will pick up, which is for the best.

  It rings through to the old tape machine because Frank never wanted to switch to voice mail. He just loved tapes. Like daughter, like father, I guess.

  And hearing his voice, low and slow, explaining to me where Stenberg Locksmithing is, I don’t expect it to make me feel all overwhelmed, but it does, even when it’s going on about operating hours that I already know by heart, and if I have a message to leave it after the beep, and I never planned on leaving one, but then I am.

  “Frank, uh, it’s Ricky. I just wanted to say that—”

  There’s a click and a scramble and that rough voice, Frank’s voice, saying, “Ricky?”

  “Uh,” is all I can say because the words I had are gone now.

  And so I just say, “Yeah.” Like an idiot.

  And he’s saying, “You just say whatever it is you need to.”

  And I didn’t expect this. Didn’t want to do it this way, but here I am trapped in it, so I struggle out with “You were like a dad to me.”

  And it sounds so stupid in my ears. Like, it doesn’t come close to how I feel. But I know he’s hearing in my voice how this’s the last conversation we’re going to have.

  “I know,” he says, and in the weight of those two words I’m hearing how he took being there for me pretty serious. “It’s my turn to say something back, so you listen.”

  He pauses there, like he’s getting his gumption up, because that’s just how he’d say it if he was on the outside of this.

  “I know about you and Rose,” he says.

  I make a noise into the phone like I just got hit. Words never felt so much like a gut punch.

  But he’s still going. “She told us, Rose did. Not a name or anything, but that there was a boy. Well, she told her mother, but I’ve read her diary a fair few times, and there was the Jeep too, that same model she drove.”

  He takes his mouth away from the receiver and coughs off to the side. “The day I saw you in Hawthorne, I thought it had to be you. But I knew it was you at Marcy’s funeral.

  “Just so you know, I’m glad she had you before the end, and I’m glad I got you afterwards. That’s all I really have to say, Son. That’s it. And just, thank you. For everything.”

  He’s never called me son before. Never called anybody that.

  Not even Glenn fucking Rios before he got that middle name for betraying.

  Then Frank’s voice gives like it never has before in all the time I’ve known him. He says, “I’m going to hang up now, but it’s not goodbye. I’ll still be with you, and you’ll still be with me because that’s just how it works.”

  And hearing that breaks something in me. I feel splinters when I breathe frozen oranges. All up and down my rib cage. In my throat. I’m thinking how those words were spoken by a man that had to endure more than anybody should ever have to.

  “Thank you too, Frank,” I say, before the line goes out with a click.

  Those words aren’t enough, but they’re the best I could do.

  I have to just sit after that. I have to look out at the sea.

  And I’m stuck on something, how Rose had a diary, and how much I want to see what she wrote, maybe what she even wrote about me, but it’s too late. I’ll never see it. And that feels like I got an anchor on me. Dragging me down.

  That makes me put my key back in the ignition and turn on the tape deck and push Fuck Dying in one last time. I rewind to the end of “I’m Not Down” and let it play out, and then we count together. Me, here and now. And Rose, back then.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  And the Raincoats come on, with their offbeat rhythm and seesawing guitars and singing like sobbing.

  “In Love,” the song is called.

  It’s what Frank’s daughter most wanted to leave me with.

  It’s what I’ve carried in me all this time.

  And that’s enough.

  71

  When the song’s over, and since I still got my phone in my hand, I dial 911. The line clicks in and the woman on the other end asks me what my emergency is. I tell her I’m about to shoot myself in the parking lot of the Korean Bell Park. I tell her I’m in a white Jeep Wrangler right next to the basketball court. I tell her they need to send somebody so a family doesn’t find my body and mess their kids’ heads up for life. I tell her I have to go now. This isn’t a prank call, and I toss the phone to the floor with a thump. I hear her faraway voice asking questions, but I don’t hear words.

  I take one hand and squeeze the back of my neck hard against the ache there before leaning over to get the gun. I check the clip and chamber. The thing is full even though I only need one.

  I’m tugging the collar of my shirt away from me so I can look down on the rose I got over my heart when a van with kids in it pulls into one of the spaces across from me, and I’m thinking, Don’t they have school or something?

  But they must not, because they get out, and as three kids make a dash for the grass, the mom minding them nods at me. And I smile back. Grateful they didn’t pull in a minute later. Or two.

  I make a check there’s nobody else around and I slide over to the shotgun seat so that when I do it and I lose control of myself, I don’t fall forward and hit that horn so people come running. I can’t have people seeing this.

  Except for Glasses and Lil Tricky. They’re still watching.

  But they can’t see how I got the gun over my heart now.

  How the cold metal of its end is sliding down my shirt, over a rib, and into the divot beneath it. It doesn’t fit right in there, between two ribs. The silencer end is too wide, too big. The space between my ribs, too small. And the problem with having my shirt on is I can’t see where the rose is on me.

  From the sandy mat by the pedals, babble’s still coming through the phone, but the operator knows I’m gone so it’s more spaced out, maybe talking to an ambulance driver. I take my shirt off. I try again.

  The gun’s colder this time when I find my spot below Rose’s rose, and I angle it down a little so I know the bullet’ll go straight through me and down. Into the seat behind me, down into the floor after that, into the Jeep’s undercarriage if it has to, but not into some little kid walking by.

  Never that.

  My palm’s sweating, and the crisscrossing grip of the gun is digging in, but all’s I can think about right now is how all people got holes in them. Holes nobody can see. Not even doctors. Holes that need filling.

  We’re born with those. Everybody is. My problem for the longest time was no
t knowing this about myself. Maybe I got more holes than most people from how I was raised. Or not raised. Maybe having parents stick around fills you up somehow, puts love and kindness into you and builds you up inside.

  And maybe if you get cracks in that foundation later it’s up to you to patch it up. But if you never had that foundation, maybe you’re just a facade. You walk around and people think you’re whole because they see you upright, walking and talking. But they can’t see down inside you. They can never know what moves you or makes you do what you do.

  My holes are bigger than most people’s. They’re bottomless. They can’t be filled. I’ve learned this about me. I’m not blaming anybody, just saying it’s true. I still did what I did to Harlem Harold. I take accountability. But I lived almost my whole life hungry, always looking for any kind of fill-up, not knowing that whatever I put in just flowed right out.

  In meetings, I’ve always had to get up in front of my peers and my people and say my name and that I’m an addict. Being sober sixteen years doesn’t change that fact. I’ll always be one and I’ll always have holes in me too.

  They’ll never be full.

  So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, what’s one more?

  Glasses

  Tuesday, September 16, 2008

  Morning

  72

  Even right up to the end, I didn’t think he’d do it. I thought he’d find some way to get slick and wiggle out of it. But then he pulled that trigger. I heard it.

  There was a little bumping sound when he shot, like a rock hitting metal inside that Jeep, but you wouldn’t know what it was unless you knew it was coming or you were looking straight at it.

  I wasn’t looking since that just seemed like private business to me, especially after all he’d been through to get to this spot, all he’d done. I made Lil Tricky go see it. To be sure. I made him walk over and look in.

  Next to me now, Lil Tricky’s holding his stomach. He’s not gonna puke, but when you see someone give it up for real, or you see a dead body, you feel it in the absolute middle of you, like your body takes a picture using a piece of you as the paper. Your soul, prolly.

  That’s why it sticks with you. It’s inside you forever after that. It walks around your dreams, looking just as clear as the day you saw it.

  I say, “You expect something else?”

  “No,” he says, but the way he says it, he didn’t know what to expect.

  “Is that what you wanted to see? Why you wanted to come down here? He hurt you so you thought it’d feel good to see him go out like that?”

  Lil Tricky’s shutting down now. He’s staring at his shoes, leaning forward, almost holding himself up by his stomach.

  “Yeah,” he finally says, sounding like the little kid he is.

  “But you feel terrible now?” I look in my side mirror and angle it way out to see this lady and her kids playing on the grass by the basketball courts.

  “Maybe.”

  “That means you still have some human in you. I think you should walk home. Nail that in some.”

  “What?”

  The lady and her kids have got some type of balloon ball and they’re hitting it back and forth to each other. It floats in the air, gets hit by weird gusts, and they adjust to it. The object of the whole thing is just to make sure it don’t touch the ground. That’s what it looks like anyway.

  They’re going pretty good at it too. Seeing that, it makes me think of how I been trying to keep everything in the air myself, all the winds I’ve been dealing with. Not so far away, coming towards us maybe, I hear a siren.

  “Now you seen a man die,” I say to Lil Tricky, “I need you to get out of the car, walk home, and think about it.”

  He’s wide-eyed, looking at me like Felix’s green frog hat before he opens his mouth. “I don’t even know how to get home!”

  “Hey, you’ll figure it out. Men figure things out.”

  He’s gonna say something else, but he stops himself and I’m glad. He can’t see it, but I got the pistol in my left hand, hidden down by my leg. I’m gripping it harder as he’s sitting there trying to make up his mind, and I’m almost about to bring it up when he moves his hand to the handle and opens his door.

  The little ceiling light pops on above us. I see how white his face is looking then, as he’s getting out, and I nod at him to get his attention as the siren’s getting closer.

  “Think about whether or not you need to be doing what you’re doing,” I say.

  He just stares back at me, blank, checked out.

  “You’re not made for this. Now I need you to close that door.”

  He does it. He puts his head down and starts walking back to the road.

  He’ll never know it, but I’m real grateful to the kid for not making me do something I didn’t want to. I put the gun back under the seat and I’m about to start up the car and pull out when a ambulance comes rushing into the parking lot with its red lights spinning and that siren going. It could only be Ghost that called it. That must’ve been the second phone call he made. What I’m thinking about that is He didn’t want the kids playing with the balloon ball to walk up on it by accident and see his body like that. All I can think of then is how honorable that is.

  From where I’m sitting, I look back to my left to see the lady grab her kids and all three of them stare into the parking lot. The balloon ball they were playing with has nobody to catch it then and it drifts, pushed by a little wind, and hits the ground, but it don’t stop. It goes on a little ways from there, skidding over some grass before stopping against the pole holding up the basketball hoop, but not for long. With a little more wind it’s going again, rolling over the basketball court as the paramedics jump out, try the door handle, and then break the driver window of the Jeep to unlock the doors.

  Glass smashes out onto the parking lot. I watch Lil Tricky watching from near a fence at the other end of the lot. His face balls up as a blond paramedic rips open the shotgun door and blood drips down from the baseboards as he puts gloved fingers on Ghost’s neck, looking for a pulse, but the guy’s staring at the chest wound while he’s doing it and knowing it’s done. I see the body clearly for just a second, a rose tattoo on an unmoving chest in black ink, and the blood beneath it almost looking like it’s coming out of it, but then it’s gone. The paramedic steps back between us and puts Ghost’s right arm up onto his lap before closing the door.

  I been around a lot of crazy stuff. A lot. But Ghost doing all he did is the craziest thing I ever seen. Anybody else would’ve ended up done in a few hours, but not him. I’m shaking a little replaying it in my head. And what’s going on right now is, my hands don’t want to stay still where they are. I’m just watching them on my lap. Twitching. I can’t remember the last time that happened to me. I thought this life couldn’t touch me like that no more, not with me seeing so much. I guess I just figured I was all dead inside from everything, but here I am, finding out I’m not.

  I’m still tripping on how Ghost was stealing that whole time for other people, some he didn’t even know. That’s just crazy. I didn’t know him that much, but already I can say he earned what he took better than anybody ever could have in the circumstances. He put something into the world that’s gonna stay here even after he’s gone. And it’s hitting me how I might want that same thing. To leave behind something better when I’m gone too. Not for no strangers. For my family.

  My hands aren’t stopping, so I grab the wheel and squeeze it until my pulse’s jumping up and down in my fingers. What I can’t get out of my head is how he saved me when he pulled that trigger. When he saved me from having to do it, he saved my whole family too, and he’ll never know it. I start up the car and put it in reverse while I’m thinking on it. I back right up. Maybe too fast. But I know I could be in his shoes pretty soon like that, so I’m braking, slapping the shift down into drive, and going out the way I came. I’m nodding my head the whole way, like I’m bobbing it to a beat only I can hear, as I’
m leaving the parking lot, hanging on to the wheel, aiming myself towards Leya, towards Felix, towards the place that isn’t home yet but is about to be.

  Author’s Note

  I found Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, by Sam Quinones, invaluable to my writing of this work. Without Quinones’s insight on the prescription pain-pill epidemic, and the heroin cells that capitalized on it, I’d know significantly less about the ranchos of Nayarit, the Xalisco Boys, and Operation Tar Pit.

  Acknowledgments

  Álvaro

  Marisa Roemer

  LAFD Battalion Chief (Ret.) Ron Roemer

  Brandon and Karishma Gattis

  Evan Skrederstu, Chris Brand, Steve Martinez, and Espi

  Gustavo Arellano

  Charles Farrell

  Carlo Rotella

  Luis J. Rodriguez

  Jenn Eneriz

  Ryan Hammill

  Patrick Hoffman

  Sara Nović

  Paula Hawkins

  Chaz Bojorquez

  Chuey Quintanar

  Sam Tenney

  Sam Quinones

  Bill Esparza

  Nick Cimmento

  Daphne Durham

  Paul Baggaley

  Lizzy Kremer

  Simon Lipskar

  Harriet Moore

  Steve Younger

  and

  The Men Who Drive Trucks with Black Plates

  About the Author

  RYAN GATTIS is the author of Kung Fu and All Involved, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Lire Award for Noir of the Year in France. Gattis lives and writes in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the street-art crew UGLARworks and a founding board member of 1888, a Southern California literary arts non-profit.

  ALSO BY RYAN GATTIS

  All Involved

  The Big Drop: Impermanence

  The Big Drop: Homecoming

  Kung Fu

  Roo Kickkick & the Big Bad Blimp

  First published 2017 by Farrar Straus & Giroux

  18 West 18th Street

  New York, NY 10011