Brambleman

by Jonathan Grant

  Roxanne, the postal worker Charlie knew best and trusted most, took his package. He turned away from the counter. When he looked at all the holiday-numb people behind him, he realized he’d completed his mission. It had nearly killed him, but he’d done it. His knees shook and he almost fell to the floor as a wave of joy and relief swept over him. Feeling holy and humble, he returned to the coffeehouse and packed his gear into the duffel. When he went to the counter to thank Jean and wish her a happy holiday, she pointed overhead at mistletoe hanging from a pipe, then pecked him on the lips.

  Grinning broadly, he hauled his gear out to the van in the back lot. And now to rid himself of the horrible burden of the blood-soaked contract—and Trouble the Terrible, hopefully. Although he’d stashed the vat in the storage unit, it always seemed to rest on his shoulders, pushing him down and forward all at once. How heavy it had been, how it made him stagger! He could already feel it lifting away into the sky as he drove off to the Store-All.

  * * *

  The Dumpster saved Charlie’s life. He was alone at the Store-All, holding the contract vat over his head, pouring its odious contents into the green bin when a deafening blast threw debris, shrapnel, and chunks of asphalt in all directions. He was shielded from the explosion by the trash bin’s considerable bulk. Metal screeched on asphalt as it shifted on the parking lot pavement and crashed into him, sending him sprawling.

  The plastic tub landed upside down on his head, dousing him with blood. It stayed there for a moment while he flailed his arms wildly. Frightened out of his wits, he first thought the blood had exploded to punish him for trying to get rid of it. Still on his butt, Charlie flung the tub to the side. His world was an inferno: heat and fire everywhere, dust and smoke in his eyes and lungs. His ears were filled with intense ringing.

  “What the fuck!” Charlie screamed, but he could barely hear himself. Wide-eyed, he scrambled to his feet. Chaos surrounded him. On the other side of the Dumpster, flames shot twenty feet into the air, and a thick cloud of black smoke roiled upward. Fires burned all over the lot. Store-All’s office window was shattered and flames licked the inside walls. The top of the Dumpster was burning, too. Smoke from burning plastic pierced his nose and stabbed his lungs.

  Dazed, with his heart racing, Charlie spit out coppery, foul-tasting blood and took a few unsteady steps around the Dumpster, crunching glass with every step. To his shock and horror, his van was now a blackened, burning hulk. Make that three burning hulks, along with a hundred minor parts—the pieces of his life—scattered all over. He looked up at the mini-warehouse’s roof in disbelief. Was that the driver’s seat on top of the building?

  It was difficult to think with that thing up there. He shook his head to clear it and realized that it wasn’t the blood, but the van that had exploded. And it was no accident. The engine was off, which meant that someone had tried to kill him with a car bomb. “Holy shit!” he cried. “I’m in Iraq!”

  His sticky-lidded eyes stung from smoke, ash, and dust. He put his forearm over the bottom half of his face and staggered around in a circle, dripping blood like Carrie at the prom. He looked at the front gate on Wynburn Avenue. Traffic had stopped. People stood beside their cars. Some moved toward him slowly but couldn’t get through the security gate. Stupid zombies.

  Yelling and honking filled the air, cutting through the ringing in his ears. “They’re trying to kill me!” he shouted, then fell to his knees and wailed, “They destroyed everything!”

  But they hadn’t—not yet, anyway. He patted the flash memory drive in his pocket. The final draft of American Monster was with him, and his Waterman pen was in his pocket, so he was still in business as a writer. He patted again and felt his wedding ring. Which was strange, because he couldn’t remember putting it there—or even carrying it with him. Had the explosion—Nah. Maybe he’d planned to hock it and just couldn’t remember now that the blast filled his head.

  In any case, everything else was in danger. The door to his unit, which he’d left open, was hanging precariously by its top hinge, and a fire burned inside. In a few minutes, his possessions would be destroyed. He needed to save what he could and get out before the zombies got to him.

  In desperation, he sprinted across the lot, leaping over wreckage, shielding his face from the flames consuming the van. With a loud grunt, he yanked the broken door off his storage unit. He blinked against the smoke, grabbed his mountain bike, its chain lock draped around the handlebars, and wheeled it out. He’d taken off his duster inside the unit earlier to wrestle with the vat. He dove back inside and grabbed it along with an old backpack. Choking on fumes, he dug into a garbage bag filled with old clothes and pulled out an armful, then stumbled out the door and stuffed them in the backpack.

  The uninsured vehicle’s burning frame now stood between him and the street. Fifty yards away, a half-dozen people were at the front gate, shouting at him to open it. “Help is on the way,” an older man yelled. But Charlie Sherman didn’t operate under man’s laws and therefore expected to derive no benefit from them.

  “No cops,” he muttered, turning away from the growing crowd. He saw the license plate on the ground. He crammed it in his pack, too. For me to know and you to find out. While he figured the police would eventually identify him, finding him was another matter. He was safer as a moving target than a sitting duck. He checked the bike’s tires. Soft, but rideable.

  To escape through the back fence, he needed his bolt cutters. Holding his breath, he stumbled back inside his unit. The heat was nearly unbearable, and smoke burned his eyes. He fumbled with the hasps on his big metal toolbox, then felt around inside and grasped a rubber-gripped handle. He rushed outside with the cutters, exhaled, inhaled, slipped on the duster and backpack, then hopped on the bike. Holding the cutters across the handlebars, he started to pedal, stopping when he saw what was left of his computer on the pavement twenty yards away from the van—the bottom half containing the hard drive. He ripped out the drive and jammed it into his pack, then pumped the bike to the back of the lot. He was now screened from Wynburn by several warehouse buildings. As he neared the fence, he heard an emergency vehicle’s whoop-whoop.

  He jumped off the bike and started snapping through fence links. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. He stuffed the cutters in his crowded pack. The wire scratched him as he rammed the bike through the slit he’d made. A steep embankment covered with thick tufts of brown grass led to some railroad tracks. He half slid, half walked down, using the bike for support, then pedaled away to a rising chorus of sirens. He bumped along on the gravel beside the tracks. When he hit a hard, smooth patch of dirt, he put the bike in high gear and pedaled fiercely, glancing over his shoulder at the towering black cloud—his life up in smoke. He wondered if this was Trouble’s work—a double-cross by the Party of the First Part. If so, he was doomed and all he was doing was stretching out the inevitable, ugly ending. Which would leave him crushed like a bug, most likely.

  Several minutes later, he stopped beneath an overpass. A jumble of shopping carts lay at the foot of a concrete embankment rising diagonally to the bottom of the bridge. Above the two pillars that supported that side of the Arbor Drive bridge, a cardboard hut was wedged between concrete and iron—a refrigerator box some poor wretch called home. The flaps were open and it appeared vacant, though its inside was lined with blankets and old coats.

  Charlie hollered out a greeting and got no answer. He leaned the bike against a concrete pillar and scrambled up the incline. As he drew near the shelter, an acrid stench assailed his nostrils. He entered and held his breath as he stripped off his bloody clothes. He flung his foul duds into the brambles beside the bridge and put on clothes pulled from the backpack. He had no pockets, so he put his phone, wallet, and keys into his pack and pedaled off in paint-covered sweat pants and a bulky sweater, the cold wind whipping his face.

  First things first. He got off the railroad right of way, took a side street, then zigged and zagged while trying to think of somewher
e he could stay, someplace warm and safe.

  Unfortunately, he could think of no such place. On top of that, his credit card was nearly maxed out and there was a price on his head, set by man or God—or maybe both. And while they hadn’t killed him, he hadn’t survived yet, either.

  His heart raced from exertion and fear. The shock of the bombing and the winter bike ride sapped Charlie’s strength and played tricks on his mind. He kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to see motorcycle cops—or a black car—racing up behind him. He felt like the world was made of quicksand, and if he stopped he’d sink into it and disappear. Every so often, he laughed at the ugly joke his life had become, with its mixed-up punch lines. Once he cried because his daddy killed himself, and now—for the hundredth time—he understood why.

  Charlie was pretty sure that the varmints had tried to kill him, since no one else cared whether he lived or died. Then again, there was Trouble, but explosives weren’t his style. Still, Charlie wasn’t letting him off the hook, not after the old trickster had suckered him into this mess in the first place.

  After an hour of riding around, feeling like a hunted animal, he needed shelter from the cold. He went to the only place he felt he could reasonably claim a right of access. Charlie locked the bike to the rack in front of the Decatur YMCA and went inside. The people there were strangers to him. A black staffer stood by the registration desk and held up a hand. “Stop.”

  “Stop?” Charlie said. “I need to—”

  “You can’t come in here like that.”

  Charlie held his membership card like a badge. “But I got to. I got to.” He turned and looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see cops rushing up on him from behind. “I just need to clean up.” His hands trembled. His eyes filled with tears. His voice cracked. “Please, sir. Please. I don’t have a place to stay. I don’t have anything anymore. I just need to clean up and go away. That’s all.”

  The man folded his arms across his chest. Charlie turned to another black staffer, the clerk sitting behind the front desk. “I pay my dues. Every month. I got a right. You can’t discriminate just because—”

  The clerk grabbed the card and gave her colleague a nasty look. “What part about the reason for the season do you not understand?” Then to Charlie: “We close in fifteen minutes, due to the holiday. You’d best hurry.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Charlie said. “I won’t forget this. Ever.” He shuffled straight toward the locker room, leaving the employees to argue about his worth. Fortunately for him, the place was nearly deserted. Charlie threw away his sweat pants and sweater, which were sticky with blood. He groaned when he glanced in the mirror and saw that his bloodstained face was covered with stuck-on ash and soot. After his shower, he put on brown corduroy pants and a white shirt, then wiped off his blood-crusted boots with a Y towel. When he looked in the mirror he was amazed to see the only marks on him were a couple of scratches where he’d pushed through Store-All’s fence.

  On the way out, he rifled through the lost-and-found bin, searching for a coat. He had to settle for a red quilted vest. He put it on under the duster and slipped out. It didn’t matter how ridiculous he looked; he felt worse.

  Now what? Crash at a cheap motel and figure out what to do next, that’s what. He pedaled into downtown Decatur and stopped at Mailbox. Even though he’d locked his bike to a lamp post, Charlie walked into the store backwards, ever watchful of his most prized possession.

  Taking time out from explaining to a customer that he couldn’t give next-day delivery on a package shipped Christmas Eve, the slacker clerk smirked at the writer’s new outfit. Ignoring him, Charlie went to his postal box and struggled to unlock it, then stopped to rub his hands together and blow on them. After a minute’s work on his hands, he was dexterous enough to turn the key. There was one piece of mail, a thin envelope from Fortress. He pulled it out and tried to open it, but his raw, red fingers were useless for such detail work. He saw a pen attached to a beaded chain on the counter. He slipped it under the flap and ripped the envelope open. Inside was a sheet of paper with numbers on it—and a check for $10,000.

  Charlie stood with his mouth open, blinking and shuddering as a great, grumbling evil lifted off his back, pinching a nerve just to be mean on its way out. He stared at the check. He could feel himself getting taller. He cried out in joy, “I made it! I made it! I made it!” and bounced out the door, dashing back an instant later to retrieve his keys from the mailbox.

  “Happy Festivus!” the slacker yelled after Charlie. “And to all a whatever!”

  Soon afterward, Charlie sauntered into Southern Trust Bank and proudly deposited $9,500 in his checking account. He kept the rest in cold, glorious cash. He stepped out of the bank a new man, bursting with joy at the realization he wasn’t going to starve or freeze to death, at least not for a while. He could start over: cheap car, cheap apartment, new shipping department clothes, even a steak and baked potato, with sweet tea to wash it all down.

  As he unlocked his bike, the wind stiffened. It would be a tougher ride now, and he had many miles to go. He hopped on and pedaled along the sidewalk, then jumped the curb into the street, his duster streaming behind him. A bus passed by. The warmth of its diesel exhaust comforted him.

  Weary and fatigued from his murderously busy day, the raw-lunged, adrenaline-spent bombing victim pedaled into the lot of his favorite Nights Inn just before dusk. He hid the bike from view and registered, sneaking a peek at the license tag in his pack, since he couldn’t remember its number. “Can I have a room on the first floor?” he asked.

  G. Patel shook her head. “You’re lucky we have anything,” she said in a lilting accent. She took his credit card and handed it back a moment later. “I’m sorry. It is not going through.”

  He’d hit his limit. His credit had crashed on Christmas Eve.

  “I can pay cash,” Charlie said with a catch in his voice, almost sobbing when he realized how close he’d come to sleeping on the street. She gave him a doubtful look. “You do take cash, don’t you?” he asked. The look on her dark, pretty face remained. “I’ll pay two nights in advance.”

  This appeased her. Charlie signed the forms and walked outside, then wheeled the bike to the stairs and carried it up to the second-floor room. Inside it was frigid. He turned the heat up, leaned the bike against the register, and collapsed on the queen-sized bed. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laid down on a mattress. Within minutes, he was asleep.

  He woke in near-total darkness. Only a thin strip of light cut between the panels of the window curtains. He jumped out of bed, threw on his boots, then sprinted out the door and down the stairs. The desk clerk looked at him impassively. “Yes?”

  “I need to get a cab. Do you have the number—”

  She put up her hand to stop his question and made a phone call. Within three minutes, a Yellow Cab pulled up. Charlie was impressed with this transportation system’s near-buslike efficiency.

  “Where to?” asked the driver, who looked like he might be related to the desk clerk.

  “Toys R Us.” They drove in silence through the thinning Christmas Eve traffic. Charlie glanced at his watch and silently fretted that he was too late.

  “Wait for me,” he told the cabbie when they reached the toy store, which was, miraculously, still open. Barely. He walked in and a manager locked the doors behind him.

  He looked around in amazement and dismay. The place had been ransacked. The popular toys were gone, but some board games, dolls, trucks, building sets, and stocking stuffers remained. He ran around grabbing things and throwing them in his cart. He stood in the checkout line behind two black men, one in a business suit, the other in a DeKalb Sanitation uniform. He supposed they were absentee fathers trying to buy their way back into their children’s hearts—just like him. Self-consciously, he slipped on his wedding ring, hoping that somehow this would make him invisible in the world of bad parents.

  He made a generous donation to the junio
r cheerleaders staffing the gift-wrap table and pushed a cartful of brightly wrapped packages out the door to the waiting cab.

  And then Charlie returned to the motel. For dinner, he ate two Nip-Chees and drank a Diet Coke from breezeway vending machines. In his room he watched It’s a Wonderful Life long enough to see George Bailey jump from the bridge. He gave a raucous cheer, then turned it off.

  He dozed again and woke when the room’s stultifying heat got to him. It was nearly 11:30 p.m. In the bathroom, he splashed cold water on his face. He called the desk and asked for another cab. He waited with his gifts at the bottom of the steps. The same driver showed up.

  “2567 Thornbriar Circle. It’s not too far.”

  Only a few minutes away, in fact. Inside his old house, lights were on. No doubt Susan was up late wrapping gifts, something they’d done together for so many years. While the driver waited on the street, Charlie tiptoed up the driveway and put the first batch of gifts in front of the door, then repeated the process. As he returned to the taxi, the porch light came on. Charlie dove into the rear seat. “Go!” he shouted as he slammed the door.

  “Back to the motel?”

  “Head that way.”

  The cab driver gave him a questioning look but complied, following the route Charlie had taken when he left home that rainy night nearly a year before—and what now seemed like a lifetime ago.

  As they approached the George Bailey Bridge over I-285, Charlie said, “Let me out here.” The bemused cabbie pulled over. Charlie paid him and got out. He watched his breath as the car drove away on the near-deserted street, then looked up the hill at the burned-out husk of the Pancake Hut, a monument to God’s wrath. Two blocks further on was his cheap motel. As he started moving toward it, the wind picked up, and his duster billowed behind him.

  The bridge trembled beneath his feet. On its narrow walkway, Charlie stood and gazed out on the night traffic rushing at him like a river full of stars. In the opposite lanes, demon eyes receded. A driver passing by honked at him. Perhaps an old neighbor, or simply someone angry at him for taking up space.