The Shotgun Rule

by Charlie Huston

  He doesn’t tell them that he cried. And he doesn’t tell them why he cried.

  He doesn’t tell them that reaching to pull his cup out of his athletic supporter, being told to put his hand down his shorts like that, made him think of his father.

  – I’m gonna kill that fucking faggot.

  George is sitting on the ground, turning his bike’s front wheel in his lap, tucking the innertube back up inside the tire.

  – Where’d you see him?

  Hector is picking up tools.

  – Over by their house.

  – Was he fucking around or headed home?

  – He was headed toward Fernando’s pad.

  George is using a screwdriver to flip the edge of the tire back inside the wheel rim. He stops.

  – Fernando’s?

  – Yeah.

  George goes back to work.

  – Shit.

  Paul is on his bike. He’s already ridden it to the corner and back twice, Andy trailing him on foot both ways, saying nothing.

  – So fucking what, he’s going to his brother’s; I’m still gonna kill him.

  Hector shakes his head.

  – Fine, man, go pedal over there and kill him. Not like Fernando won’t be home. Not like Ramon didn’t get out of Santa Rita last month. You see him since he got out?

  – Fuck him.

  – Looks like all he did in there was eat and pump iron.

  Paul limps his wrist.

  – And take it in the ass.

  Hector turns away.

  – I’m just saying, you know, you don’t want to mess with Fernando and Ramon.

  George has slipped the wheel back onto his bike’s front forks. With a crescent wrench he gradually tightens the nuts on either side of the wheel, giving it a spin after each turn of the wrench to be certain that it stays true.

  – When’d Timo move out of his folks’?

  Hector has pulled out a nearly full pack of Marlboro Reds. He takes one for himself and hands the pack around.

  – Don’t know. My sister says he got in a fight with his mom and hit her in the stomach and his dad threw him out. Like, dragged him out the front door and threw him and a bunch of his shit on the lawn. So now he’s at Fernando’s.

  The others are quiet as they each take a smoke from the pack.

  George takes out a Bic sheathed in the stainless steel and turquoise case he bought at the Devil’s Workshop head shop last summer. They all bum a light.

  Hector takes the pack back and looks at Paul.

  – And that’s all. He’s over there with his brothers. You ride over there and fuck him up, they’re gonna kill you.

  Paul bites the filter of his cigarette and gets back on his bike.

  – Fuck ’em. I’ll fucking kill those faggots if they let me take ’em one on one. Only way they can take me is if they gang up.

  – Well, shit, man, that’s what they fucking do.

  George gives the wheel a final spin and packs the last of his tools away.

  – Doesn’t matter what they do. We got to go over there. They got Andy’s bike.

  And that’s when they look around and realize that Andy’s gone.

  Such a Dildo

  Andy was cool till Hector mentioned Alexandra and they all stopped talking.

  Andy stopped talking because the thought of Alexandra always shuts him up. Shuts him up and makes his face hot so that he has to turn away. What sucks is that George and Paul stopped talking, too. Like they didn’t want to accidentally say something in front of Hector about the sudden curves that have broken out over Alexandra’s body. It’d be bad enough if Hector knew Andy was thinking about her that way. If he knew George and Paul had started checking her out, he’d have flipped. Pulled out the length of bicycle chain he keeps stuffed in his pocket, wrapped it around his fist and started swinging at his best friends.

  Not that they really have to worry. Hector hasn’t noticed the looks that follow Alexandra down the street. Hector still sees the same little girl he’s always seen. But Andy’s always seen her different, always seen how pretty she is. Not that she knows anything about it. Or anything about him.

  But she knows about Timo.

  Why couldn’t it just be the damn bike?

  Thinking about Timo on his bike, that sucks. That made him start thinking about ways of hurting Timo. Started a riot in his head. Dreams of finding Timo on his bike and pushing him off it and into the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

  Another imaginary murder skidding across his brain. Leaving him wondering what the fuck is wrong with him. Why does he think about shit like that?

  Which is stupid, because it’s really his own fault the bike got stolen in the first place. If he’d not been so stupid, if he’d just locked up the bike, that piece of shit bike, Timo wouldn’t be on it right now. Not Timo’s fucking fault that he found an unlocked bike lying around. You don’t blame a guy for picking up the five dollar bill you let fall out of your pocket. So what if Timo’s never missed an opportunity to casually run him into a wall in the corridors at school? So what if Timo shouts choke every time he swings the bat in PE softball games? Lots of kids do that. Man, kids have been doing that shit to Andy since his first day of kindergarten. Since the first time he started getting noticed and people started talking about how smart he is. If he can’t put up with that shit by now, what’s the point? He pictures using one of the nicked and scarred aluminum PE bats to cave in Timo’s forehead.

  And repeats his mantra: ImsuchadildoImsuchadildoImsuchadildo.

  The secret formula that halts the violence in his head. Most of the time.

  But Alexandra.

  Andy understands why she knows that Timo had been kicked out. She knows for the same reason that Andy knows many of the details of her life: because she likes Timo. God! Bad enough he catches Paul and George looking at her. Just now, after he’s been looking at her for years. That’s bad enough. And it’s fucking gross. Bad enough that Timo might like her. But that she likes him back?

  Isn’t anything his? Isn’t there one fucking thing that is worthless enough that he can have it to himself? His own pair of jeans that aren’t George’s hand me downs? His own smokes that aren’t bummed from someone else? A crap pair of Cheetahs sneakers because his folks won’t get him Pumas because he’s just gonna grow out of them anyway? His water spotted books that come from some library sale of shit that’s not good enough for the shelves anymore? The girl that no one else notices because she’s quiet and scrawny and he’s the only one who sees how pretty she is? His own piece of shit bike that his dad cobbled together from old Schwinn and Huffy parts that he salvaged from garage sales? Can’t he at least have that? A bike that everyone makes fun of? Can’t he have that without having to worry about someone fucking jerking it away from him and not giving it back till it’s broken and used up and all the fun has been taken out of it because it’s just one more fucking reminder of what a dildo he is?

  Fucking Timo!

  The pictures come again, and he does nothing to try and stop them.

  Fucking Andy!

  George rides hard, trying to find his brother.

  Sometimes? Sometimes, man, he just wishes he didn’t have a brother at all. How much easier would that make life?

  Fifteen years since the little shit was born, and he’s been underfoot every single day of every single year. Always such a baby. Such a crybaby. From the moment Mom came home from the hospital with him he was crying. God! The years of sharing a room with him after he was too old to sleep in mom and dad’s room but before dad put in the attic room, was there anything worse than that? Six years old and the kid was always waking up with nightmares, crying.

  Dad off on the graveyard shift at the quarry back then, mom so tired at the end of the day you could throw rocks at the wall and she wouldn’t wake up. Having to climb out of the top bunk, the one Andy wouldn’t take because he was afraid he’d roll out in the middle of the night, and sit on the edge of his mattress and
rub his back until he stopped being scared and went to sleep. And then being awake for an hour after that before he could get back to sleep. Getting in trouble the next morning for not getting out of bed right away when mom came to wake them. Years of that shit. Walking downtown together to go to a matinee during the summer, having to walk slow because Andy couldn’t keep up. Andy, the little super genius, always so special. Always such a pain. Teachers and people looking at George, wondering what went wrong with him, why he didn’t get to take the gifted classes. But finally getting to high school, having it to himself, two years before having to worry about Andy, before having to worry about wiping his nose and making sure he didn’t get initiated too bad. And then the little punk goes and gets skipped a grade and it turned into only one year without him. Fine, they were still in different buildings. Then he got skipped again. Straight from freshman to junior. All last year, his little brother on the same schedule, walking between classes at the same time, taking the honors versions of the same courses he’s taking. And it’s gonna be worse when school starts again. Senior year, class of ’84. Should be nothing but good times, nothing but ditch days and double lunches and make work and senior trip and barely having to be around the fucking hellhole because the senior classes are such a joke. Best year of his life and he’s gonna have Andy with him for every day of it. Every single day. Why couldn’t he get skipped again? Why couldn’t the little freak be going straight off to college like everybody knows he’s going to do? Sometimes he’d swear the kid could have skipped if he wanted to, could have worked a little harder, but didn’t. Worked just hard enough so he could catch up to George and drag around behind him like a fucking boat anchor.

  He pumps down the street, cutting across the heavy traffic on Murrieta, the shaft of the ball peen hammer stuffed in his back pocket banging against his lower back. He coasts for a moment so he can reach behind and shove the head of the hammer deeper into his pocket, making certain it doesn’t fall out. He doesn’t want to lose the hammer. If the Arroyos hurt his little brother he’s gonna use it to smash their teeth out.

  Andy watches from the little league fields behind the elementary school as George rides past on the street. Paul already came by, taking his bike straight across the school’s blacktop playground. Hector will be riding the longest way around, all the way down Murrieta to Olivina before cutting toward the Arroyos’ neighborhood. They’ll have split up the routes to catch him before he can get himself into any trouble. And if it were a race, they would catch him, any one of them could run him down easy. But he’s not racing, he’s hiding, and no one can catch him when he’s hiding.

  Out after curfew, when a cop car rolls up and they all break in different directions, Andy is the one who’s never caught. He’s not sure how he does it. The hiding places aren’t even that good sometimes, but he knows when the spot is the right one.

  When George goes on a rampage in their house because he’s realized that Andy borrowed one of his favorite albums without asking and then put it back in the wrong jacket, he has a checklist of hiding places to look in. Cupboards, under the stairs, cracks behind large pieces of furniture, the roots of shrubs, high branches of trees even though he knows his brother fears all heights, in the hatchback of their mom’s yellow Fiesta. Once, he opened the sofa bed, certain Andy had figured a way to close it and replace the cushions with himself folded inside. But in the end George always has to do the same thing. He stands in the middle of the house and yells. Come out right now and I’ll only punch you once, make me wait and I’ll fucking kill you. And when Andy comes out he hits him. Twice.

  Now George passes and Andy stands up from where he’s been sitting in the shadow of one of the bleachers, trots across the blacktop, over the white painted basketball and foursquare courts, his pockets loaded with rocks he sifted from the dirt while he hid. The new twenty sided die he bought today, the one that drew him into the game shop and caused him to leave his bike unlocked outside, squeezed tight in his hand.

  Hector takes the long way around. All the way down Murrieta and then across on Olivina and then up on North P. Like Andy is gonna go that way on foot.

  But George is right, they have to cover it. It would be like Andy to take the long way around just because they would be thinking he’d never take it. But it’s also too obvious a dodge, so there’s still no way he’d take it. But maybe it’s so obvious a dodge, he might take it. Freaky little kid. They have to cover it. And Hector has to ride it.

  Partly it’s because he can ride the longest without getting winded. George can beat him in any sprint and can out trick them all when they start pulling stunts. Paul will take his Redline over any jump, pedal full out down any gravel strewn hill and bang off any other BMXer on the homemade dirt track all the kids ride on in the fields beyond the firebreak. But for distance it’s Hector. He can ride all day, all night, he can ride full out for a mile and hop off and start swinging.

  The other thing is, George and Paul think they’re better fighters. Well, they talk more about it, and Paul gets in more fights than anyone, but that’s because he’s always mouthing off and starting them. He just doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut. Doesn’t know how to keep shit inside. Doesn’t know that if you want to kick someone’s ass you just do it, you don’t talk shit about it. Hector knows that’s how it’s done. Just stand there and stare at the sidewalk while some redneck calls you spic and wetback and makes fun of your mohawk and the safety pins in your earlobe, and when he turns to his friends to laugh at you, you pull your fist, wrapped in eighteen inches of bicycle chain, out of your pocket and start punching him in the side of the head.

  George and Paul think if there’s trouble at the Arroyos’ it’s best they be the first two showing up. They think they’ll be able to do something. They’re wrong. They could all three show at the same time, leap off their bikes and dive straight into a hook, but if Fernando and Ramon are there they won’t stand a chance.

  Regarding Your Mother’s Pussy

  The Arroyos were legend long before George, Paul, and Hector got to high school.

  Bantamweights, they brawled their way through the school system until they emerged at high school, having moved up several weight classes.

  Fernando was the first. He spent five years at the high school, leaving behind him a shattered and exhausted administration and a faculty that was to a soul nothing but grateful that they had survived. He had taxed the personal behavior codes to the limit, twisted them, and found loopholes so obscure the entire rule book had to be revised upon his departure. And yet, despite the physical damage he had done to the campus and assorted classmates, despite the psychological scars he had left on his teachers, despite all this, the football coach and athletic boosters had campaigned relentlessly to have a special grading curve installed to keep his GPA hovering in the vicinity of a C+, just that fraction across the border from C that would have allowed him to play varsity football. Their efforts had been inspired by the havoc he had wreaked as both an offensive lineman and linebacker in j.v. ball.

  Any opposing player unlucky enough to have to line up opposite him, any bullrushed quarterback, any running back or wide receiver required to pass through his domain on the field, was inclined to trip and fall while he was still yards away rather than endure the rib cracking nose breaking concussion inducing hits he routinely laid down. If the ball was fumbled, every player, his own teammates included, ran from it, terrified of the prospect of ending up in his clutches at the bottom of a pile. His heavily taped fist pounding your groin, fingers gouging at your eyes, a barrage of Spanish curses regarding your mother’s pussy screamed in your ear. But, gamer though he may have been, his all but flawless record of nonattendance in class kept him from advancing to the varsity squad.

  State, Coach sometimes mumbled drunkenly at the Rodeo Club, we had had that Arroyo muchacho, we woulda gone State.

  In his third junior year he turned eighteen and passed finally into adulthood and the clutches of the criminal justice s
ystem. His record as a minor was admirable enough that his first adult arrest earned him a conviction (sentence suspended), and a final expulsion.

  With Fernando gone, the school board heaved a brief sigh of relief, then began preparing for the arrival of Ramon.

  The preparations were insufficient. Ramon commenced upon his own Sherman’s March the first day of his freshman year. Announcing his presence by egging the entire faculty parking lot at midday in full view of the sixty eight year old campus security guard, who had been phoned at home the night before and told that if he ever called the police on an Arroyo he would have a Colombian necktie the next morning. He didn’t know exactly what a Colombian necktie was, but, recognizing Fernando’s voice over the line, he knew he didn’t want one.

  Ramon lasted barely one year, doing as much damage in that time as Fernando had done in five. But shortly after summer vacation began he was arrested for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. The deadly weapon being a hacksaw he wielded like a machete when a clerk at the 7-Eleven refused to open the register for him. He was convicted and sent to juvy and was never seen on campus again. As a student anyway. As a former student he was often seen in Fernando’s Impala, spinning donuts on the grass. The school left the lawns torn and unseeded until Ramon earned his first conviction as an adult and was sent to county for three to five.

  Both were long gone when George, Paul, and Hector began their freshman year, but Timo was in their class.

  It seemed Timo had watched Fernando’s and Ramon’s progression and decided it wasn’t for him. He played j.v. and varsity soccer and starred on both squads. He maintained a dead on C+ average that never faltered, the product of a series of tutors who were paid to write his papers and prep cheat sheets for his tests.