Suckers

by Z. Rider

  “Food shortages everywhere? Oil shortages, power going out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And this is a worldwide thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shoot myself in the head,” Ray said. “I can’t hack the worst of humanity, especially my own.”

  “There you go,” Stick said. “He sacrifices himself so the rest of us can eat a few more days.”

  “You’re not eating me,” Ray said. “The rest of them, okay, but you—stay away from me. I’m worried you’d go straight for my dick.”

  “Nah, not a fan of tube steak.”

  “Brraaaains,” Jamie said.

  But Dan sat up. “What if the situation improved, though? What if smart people figured out a solution, and things turned around?”

  “You mean what if in a week or a month or half a year later the world is saved?” Ray said. “I guess I’m shit out of luck then. But what are the odds, once everything starts falling apart? Our support system is just a line of dominos. I think if someone can catch that first one before it goes over, we’re fine. But once that first one hits the next…we’re fucked. They’re all going down. Give me a gun and a bullet. You guys can watch the world end without me.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, a can of Natty Ice propped on his knee.

  The lounge got quiet.

  Dan finally said, “I’d kinda miss you.”

  Ray cracked his eyes open, and part of the night before came sliding back to Dan, putting him off kilter. The bees buzzing, the thud of skull against cabinet, the give of the fleshy part of Ray’s hand. He took a pull off the last of his beer to drag himself away from it.

  Ray said, “Well, I’d kind of miss you too.” He closed his eyes again. “If my brains weren’t splattered all over the dirt.”

  “Jesus,” Stick said. “What if you missed?”

  “Missed?” asked Josh.

  “Yeah, you know, like those people who try to commit suicide,” Stick said, “only the bullet goes through their jaw instead, or just nicks their brain—you know, leaving them simple the rest of their lives.”

  “We picked up a girl once when I was with the rescue squad,” Moss said. “Fifteen years old. Terrible home life. Her father’d been forcing himself on her since she was three. Her mother cut out of the picture when she was eight, leaving her behind with this asshole. She bought a gun from someone at school one day, kept it under her pillow for three months, couldn’t bring herself to shoot the cocksucker. She was afraid he’d get it from her and beat the crap out of her for it. One day, she couldn’t take it anymore. She put it to her head.” He pantomimed it. “Bam. Only she flinched when she pulled the trigger. She’ll be blind the rest of her life. Big chunk of her face right here, gone. Last I heard she was living in a home for the blind. Got her away from that asshole at least, but that’s about the only good thing you can say about it.”

  “Shit,” Stick said.

  Ray said, “Dan’ll finish it. Right?”

  If it meant not having to watch Ray die slowly, or scream in agony, or live the rest of his life drooling down his chin, unable to even pick out “My Dog Has Fleas” on a guitar… “Sure,” he said quietly. “If you fuck it up, I’ll finish it off.”

  Ray smiled. “You’re a pal. I’m holding you to it.”

  “Pussy,” Stick said. “I could never do myself in as long as there was pussy out there.”

  The lounge was quiet for a moment, until Josh busted out laughing, and everyone else followed, except Ray, who smiled distantly and took a pull off his beer.

  “Okay,” Jamie said, “forget the zombie apocalypse. What if aliens landed and tried to colonize us?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Their last show was in Massachusetts. Two hours after loading out, they rolled over the New Hampshire line. By the time they pulled into Dan’s mother’s driveway in Deerfield, it was edging on four a.m.

  Seeing his car sitting there—his mom had been taking it out weekly to keep it running—gave him a rush. Freedom, independence, the ability to go wherever the fuck he wanted whenever the fuck he wanted without relying on anyone or making arrangements.

  It was good to see all the familiar things—the old split-level, the barn, the gas station down at the bottom of the hill.

  By the time they finished unloading equipment into the barn, Dan’s mom was up, standing on the front steps in her bathrobe, calling out that she had a big pot of coffee and plenty of eggs and bacon on. More than enough for everyone, as long as they didn’t mind scrambled. The band and crew trotting to the door, saying, “Don’t put yourself out, Mrs. Ferry.”

  “Hey, Mom.” Dan gave her a hug.

  “Everything go okay?”

  “Yep.”

  “And this one was it for a while?”

  “Yep.”

  She smiled. “It’ll be good to have you around again.”

  “I don’t know. I might freak out when I wake up a few days from now and I’m still in the same place.”

  Moss, Carey, and Stick were on the phone with families and girlfriends, arranging pick-ups. Josh was going to have Stick drop him off. The bus driver’d be on his way to a hotel after breakfast, then to Atlanta to return the bus to the leasing company. And Dan would get the band home.

  Once they had full bellies, everyone was antsy to be on their way. He gave his mother another hug and a promise to come by for dinner soon before hopping in his car with Ray and Jamie.

  “So where are we taking you?” Dan asked as he pulled out of the driveway.

  Jamie sighed. “My parents’.”

  To Ray, Dan said, “Do you want me to drop you off first?”

  “Nah, don’t go out of your way.” He slouched in the seat, getting his head comfortable. “I’m good. It’s nice to see some familiar stretches of road again.” He propped his foot against the dash.

  “I don’t know; all those other stretches of road are starting to look pretty familiar now, too. It’s nice to see some road from behind a steering wheel for a change, though.”

  “Hey, Joe would’ve let you take over the wheel of the bus any time.” He would have: Ray’d slid into Joe’s seat a time or two, letting the driver grab a piss, stretch his legs. Dan just didn’t think he could drive a bus without a little road training first.

  “Glad to be home?” Dan asked him as they merged onto I-93.

  “Yeah, well. It’ll be nice to see the old shithole again.” Ray had an apartment at the back of a multi-family building his brother and sister-in-law owned. It was the darkest and smallest of the building’s units, but the rent was hard to beat, and with Buddy and his family in the next building over, he had the peace of mind of someone looking out for break-ins while he was gone.

  “I hate this fucking place,” Jamie said as they got off the interstate.

  Jamie’d been in marching band in high school too, but in Merrimack. Drums, not tuba. He’d hung out in Manchester Friday and Saturday nights, usually at the arcade on Valley Street, where the video games got shoved against the walls to make room for shows by local bands, but Dan and Ray had made a game of trying to get into real clubs, driving halfway into Maine if they had to, chasing one garage band or another they’d heard about through word of mouth. They didn’t cross paths with Jamie till they found him playing for a shitty ska band in a club in Concord. After they heckled him into quitting that band to join theirs—which they were calling Aces & Eights at the time—practices moved out of Dan’s parents’ basement into Jamie’s parents’ garage, which gave them a lot more space.

  Jamie’s parents made good money and put his two sisters through college. Jamie was supposed to go, but he never got around to writing the application essays. His dad got pissed off, wrote one up for him, and sent the applications out. Jamie carried the only acceptance letter he’d gotten in his back pocket for a while, probably until he lost it. Never told his parents about it. It would’ve meant leaving the band, and being in a band had sounded a whole lot better to all of them than sitting throug
h another four years of school.

  Dan dropped him off in front of the garage they practiced in when they were teenagers before getting himself and Ray back on Route 3 to Manchester. The car was quiet—what’d he and Ray have to say to each other after sharing the same few hundred square feet of space for the better part of two years?

  In the light of morning, Ray looked like he’d been living on the street. He hadn’t shaved since before the hospital, his shirt rumpled like he’d wadded it up at the bottom of his bunk then pulled it back on three or four days in a row. He just might have.

  He was gnawing at his lip, looking out the window, when Dan pulled up to the sidewalk in front of his building, a three-story, asphalt-sided, diarrhea-tan box with no appreciable architectural detail. A crumbling driveway led to a tenant parking area around back, where Ray’s car likely sat. His brother, Buddy, and Buddy’s wife, Sarah, used it as their second when Ray was on the road, and paid half the insurance for the privilege.

  “Well, give me a ring in a few days, man,” Ray said. He offered his hand. Dan went to shake it, and Ray pulled back at the last second, his fingers brushing Dan’s palm. He smoothed his hair with a smirk.

  “Some things just never change,” Dan said.

  “Some boys just never grow up.” With that, he was out of the car, his boots crunching on road debris.

  In that split second before Ray’d slid his hand away, Dan thought he’d heard the bees again. Far, far away. He listened for them now, but all he heard was the ticking of the engine.

  Exhaustion. He hadn’t slept in thirty-something hours. He was hepped up on two cups of his mother’s high-octane coffee. No surprise he was a little shaky. He opened his hand and looked at it. Either his eyes or his fingers were trembling a little.

  A soft thump came from the back of the car.

  Oh yeah. He yanked the trunk lever. As he waited for Ray to slam it closed, he tapped the steering wheel. As if the distraction of percussion could keep the bees away.

  Ray rapped on the side window, gave Dan a last nod, and walked off with two bags over his shoulder and a guitar case in each hand. Dan pulled away.

  Dan’s apartment was on the third floor of a boxy white building that dominated the corner it sat on—just five blocks from the apartment where Ray and Buddy had grown up. Sometimes he drove by there for old time’s sake, the place still looking like it was waiting for Mr. Ford to come home at the end of another shift, but it’d been six or seven years since Mr. Ford had come home, not since that final heart attack.

  It was strange walking up the back steps of his building with the early-morning sun on his back. The place was at once familiar and surreal. He felt superimposed on it, like it was a ViewMaster slide. Click-click: here was his porch. Click-click: here was his back door.

  He set his bags down and fished for the right key.

  “Home” was a strange concept after all that traveling.

  He let himself into the kitchen. Four rooms opened right off it: bathroom around the corner, living room straight ahead, two bedrooms through doors at the other end. The place was clean, not a spot of dust. Of course: the price you paid for leaving your house keys with your mother. He wheeled his suitcase against the kitchen table, glanced at the mail sorted into neat piles: bills, personal, business, magazines, junk. A Pappy’s Pizza magnet clipped a note to the fridge door, pale blue paper with handwriting he identified from across the room. He slipped it free, reading off the list of ready-to-heat meals his mom had put in the fridge so he wouldn’t have to worry about cooking. She’d also had the landlord fix the flickering light fixture in the bathroom, and his great-aunt Cathy had had cataract surgery—maybe he could drop by and see her Sunday.

  “Thanks, Mom.” He folded the note.

  The junk mail went right into the trash, the magazines into the bathroom. The business stuff he didn’t even want to think about, and the personal mail amounted to a reminder to schedule a dental cleaning and a late birthday card from a girl he’d gone to high school with who managed to remember him on two or three card-giving occasions throughout the year. He sent her postcards from the road sometimes. She was married now, two kids and managing a restaurant in North Conway. Everybody was married now, it seemed like.

  With the mail processed, he headed into the bathroom, which was so vacant that his footfalls echoed off the porcelain tub. When he was finished there, he wandered across the kitchen and into his bedroom, looking it over—everything neat and dust free. In the living room, he dropped onto his couch.

  Three stories below, cars crept up the street. Someone in the building had their daytime TV turned up. A guy down on the sidewalk called to someone else out there and laughed, and up the street, probably at the auto body shop, metal clanked to no particular rhythm.

  What he didn’t hear was buzzing in his head.

  He lifted his hand in front of him.

  Still a little trembly. Thirty-some hours without sleep, two cups of Ma’s coffee. No surprise there.

  And no fucking buzzing. In the car with Ray, that had just been a fluke. His imagination.

  He dropped his hand and sat there with no idea what to do with himself, outside of the obvious: unpack, take a shower, crawl into bed. He was too beat to unpack, too wired to sleep.

  This was how it was, coming off the road, like you’ve been on a roller coaster, up, down, around and upside-down, and it’s crazy for three, four, six months at a stretch—then it comes to a stop.

  Dust motes hung in the air. Even they’d come to a stop.

  The apartment felt empty.

  It felt huge.

  Ray’d been the first to get his own place, a decade ago now, itching to get out on his own, live the glamorous flophouse life while he worked at a machine shop to fund his lifestyle of take-out food and beer, which he paid the old guys in the building to buy for him. The place, over on Pine Street, had had one bathroom per floor, no hot-plates allowed in the rooms, and each room came with a bed, a dresser, and a clothes bar mounted between two walls.

  Ray was happy as shit, going home to his own place at the end of every night. That was back when his dad was still alive and Buddy, who was going to college in town and working full time to pay for it, was living at home to save on expenses.

  Dan had thought Buddy had the right idea—his parents’ place was a little out of the way, out in Deerfield, but it was cheap, the food was free, and his mom made plenty of it. He had a car, he could get around. Why give up a good thing?

  Jamie’d wanted out of his parents’ house, but he turned his nose up at the flophouse. It took a while, but eventually he talked Dan into getting a “real apartment” with him. That lasted four months before Jamie moved back to his parents’—it was that or get a job to cover his share of the rent.

  The real apartment was where Dan still lived—since he was there so little, it was hard to justify moving.

  Whenever they got off the road and he found himself sitting on the couch in the empty living room listening to the neighborhood below, he kind of wished Jamie was still there. Just a little. Just so there’d be someone there he could say, “Well shit. What do we do now?” to, and maybe get an answer. Jamie, for all his lack of responsibility, had actually been fun to hang out with, way back when.

  He dragged himself off the couch, intending to start unpacking. Instead he said, “Shit,” and put a hand to his head, closing his eyes against the dull pain there.

  People get headaches.

  He’d been awake way too long. The tour was finally fucking over. A little tension headache wasn’t unusual.

  CHAPTER NINE

  He dreamed of the buzzing two nights in a row, and woke the morning of his third day home with the skin at the back of his neck prickly and hot. A scalding shower—followed by a blast from the cold tap—took care of that, but not the cleaver-like headache he was getting from sleeping so much. His gut wasn’t buying that explanation for it, but he didn’t want to listen to his gut.

  He was o
ut of coffee, and just about out of socks, thanks to the tour. He pulled on yesterday’s pair, trying to think what else he needed. Keeping busy was key, he decided. Give himself stuff to do, have a good meal, play for a while, sit out on the back porch and watch the neighborhood—maybe even write something. Then a good night’s sleep—no sweaty fucking dreams.

  He added sleep aids to the mental shopping list.

  A couple blocks from the apartment, he pulled into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot to take care of his immediate and future needs for caffeine. It was an off-hour of the morning. The place was empty. He grabbed a bag of ground coffee off a rack, plopped it on the counter, and asked a woman in a brown visor for a large regular—up this way that was how you ordered cream and sugar, and it was one of the things he looked forward to getting back to when he was on the road. The little bits of familiarity.

  “That’ll be eleven twenty-seven,” she said.

  He slid his card through the machine with her staring like she was trying to get a look at his face. He wondered if it showed something—the headache, maybe squirmy things in his eyes. A bitter taste washed his mouth. He had a sudden feeling like he needed to sit down.

  What you need to do is relax.

  “Do you want your receipt?” she asked.

  “Nah.”

  While she went to get his coffee, he tapped the counter, reading the advertisement in front of the cash register. As she made her way back, he lifted his head.

  “You look so familiar,” she said, handing the Styrofoam cup to him. Her fingers bumped his.

  The bees lurched from their half-sleep.

  The cup slipped right through his hand.

  “Shit,” she said. “I mean shoot! Shoot. I’m so sorry. I let go before you had it.”

  “It’s okay.” He lifted his bag of coffee from the counter, its bottom dripping.

  “Let me get that.” She had a towel out, reaching for the bag.

  Afraid she was going to touch him again, he let it fall into the mess. “Shit. Sorry.” He scrubbed the side of his face.