Give Me Some Truth

by Eric Gansworth

  The ER doctors did a press conference. They confirmed the victim was Lennon and that the damage was so bad, he’d probably been dead when the first bullet hit. Seemed like a convenient lie to me, a way to say there’d been nothing they could do. But you could understand the impulse to lie, to save face. And to most of those directly in front of them, what they said didn’t even matter. I could picture the goons, not even listening, trying to get their ass faces on TV. Like Custard, parading around on local news after he’d shot Derek in the butt. That’s what so many ass faces thought FAME was: being at the right place at the right time.

  Here, there were only two of us. Me and Custard. No witnesses. No one to say, “I was there when Custard really made his last stand.” No one except me. And I wasn’t gonna talk.

  “What the hell?” he muttered, looking at the red body outline. He unlocked his van, threw his bowling bag in it, and started kicking gravel, spreading the stones. Truth? I was relieved. He’d seen it. He’d remember it. And there was no evidence it had ever existed.

  “Feeling guilty, General Custard?” I asked, stepping out.

  “What?” he said, looking up, puzzled. Tears on his cheek shone in the shelter lights. “What do I got to feel guilty about?”

  “You don’t remember shooting someone recently?” I asked, stepping closer.

  “I shot someone in self-defense. Said he had a gun!”

  “Did you see a gun?”

  “Said he had one. Said it was in his sweatshirt pocket. Looked enough like a gun to me.”

  “Does this look like a gun?” I said, pushing my pocketed hand forward. “It’s not. Just so you know. In case you’re still strapping handguns around your waist.”

  “Don’t get cocky, son. You do this? The spray paint? I know you. You’re the kid who screwed up my business this fall. I kept that article. I got your face blown up on the wall.”

  “Like a Wild West poster? Wanted Dead or Alive?”

  “My workers have orders to refuse you service and call the cops on your trespassing ass.”

  “Don’t you even get that you shot someone, you redneck piece of shit?” I said, stepping closer. Custard did not back down. Maybe he was still carrying a gun. “That you decided to pull a loaded gun out of a holster, and point it at another person, and then fire.”

  “Like I said,” he mumbled, shrugging. Then, suddenly cocky, he grinned. “Self-defense. Wasn’t me stepping into a place of business, planning to rob someone. Live by the sword—”

  “You’re crying about the news and you say that? Did Lennon live by the sword? Or did some asshole with a loaded gun just decide that shooting someone was okay, the best thing to do?”

  “You can’t compare what I did to this! This was one of the Beatles! Someone who changed the world! That little shit at my place was just another drunk Indian! Maybe I shouldn’t have aimed so generous. I’m a good shot, and I was in the right.” He looked with worry at the way my hands were bunched inside my jacket pockets.

  The PA said the person in custody was being called a local screwball. Who had been the local screwball here? The burger joint owner strapped with revolvers, naming himself for a western Indian Killer, or my stupid brother, trying to make a political point by stealing burgers and cash?

  “If you were in the right, how come you lied? That revolver wasn’t loaded with blanks.”

  “How would you know? You involved?”

  “You know those were live rounds,” I observed.

  “I was involved.”

  “But you lied on record. You get rid of bullets and casing? Tampering with evidence.”

  “No one come forward to complain about what kind of bullet was in his ass. Just my word out there.” We stared at each other. The news in the air listed ways things should have been better—Lennon lived blocks from the hospital, the cops arrived immediately—but it didn’t work out. “Kid. Take your hand out of your pocket. Please. There’s been enough violence for one night.”

  Even here, Custard was on guard, and I only noticed in that moment that his hands were in his coat pockets too. The PA faded the news out and put music back on. Must be a greatest hits. I imagine they’d release something else now, including a couple songs off the new album. Now that there wouldn’t be any other new ones.

  “Kid, please,” he moaned. I slowly pulled my hand out. The chain was wrapped around it several times. Eventually, the Master Lock end dropped, dangling in the breeze. I started twisting my wrist, and the lock swung, its arc getting wider and stronger.

  “General Custard? Take your hands out of your pockets,” I said, stepping forward.

  December 8, 11:39 p.m.

  “Maggi!” someone whispered in my ear. Damn! I’d been noticed. “I’ve come for you.”

  “Lewis?” He put his arms around me, and we cried together. I could feel his body hitch.

  “I feel like I’ve been heart-punched,” he said, hugging me harder. “Like I’ve lost someone in my family.” It felt good, but not like the way Jim hugged me. Lewis wasn’t pressing his pelvis into mine. This felt like someone who cared for me.

  Not for my body, my own internal voice suddenly said. It had been waiting to spring and leapt as soon as I’d seen Jim hold up his hand to stop me. That was not the action of a man who loved me. It was the action of someone who, even in a moment like this, was worried about being caught in some compromising position. And once that idea landed in my skull, others joined it.

  Sometimes they sounded like my mom, sometimes Marie, and sometimes, of course, Ghost Marvin. The harshest ones, though, I recognized as my own, the observations I’d been unwilling to acknowledge. Naturally, I wanted to be seen as an equal to Jim, but the flip side was more questionable.

  Right, the new voice said. An adult has a world of experience to offer a young person, but why does a thirty-year-old man want that kind of relationship with a fifteen-year-old? None of the answers were great.

  But there could be a reasonable answer. Maybe you’re more fun when you’re young. You don’t know what kind of life you’ll have when you’re thirty, I tried to tell the New Voice.

  Exactly! it said back. Every time I tried to convince myself we’d come this far because I was so mature, all I could picture were the times he’d rubbed up against me because it made him feel so good, and the sexy things he’d said when no one else was around, the things he asked me to do for him, and the ways he asked me, always, to take things further than I was ready for. I could only come up with one answer.

  What he wanted was sex with a fifteen-year-old.

  Jim had made it clear we weren’t going to be together in any regular sense, because others wouldn’t understand, and somehow, I’d told myself that it was worth it, to be considered mature enough.

  “Carson’s here too,” Lewis said as he pulled away. He looked directly into my eyes, seeing me, a person with my own choices. “Marvin told us what you’re planning.”

  You’re welcome, sister, Ghost Marvin said, but I did not dignify it with a response.

  “We had some lame idea to …” Lewis said, pausing. He knew he was about to say something stupid, something wrong he couldn’t take back. “I don’t know, rescue you? I don’t want you doing something you’re going to regret, just to help me, or to help Carson. You should love the person you … you know. Shouldn’t you?”

  “What I do is my business,” I said, my teeth gritted between my lips. “I have feelings for Jim.” With that harsh voice inside my head, I suddenly couldn’t bring myself to say I loved Jim. Not to Lewis. Maybe not even to myself. But still. “I was going ahead because I wanted to. No one decides what I do but me!” (But someone had been trying to decide, hadn’t he?)

  “You don’t want to anymore?” he asked. Lewis, always the grammarian, heard me use the past tense.

  “You and Carson can’t decide who I’m interested in, or who Marie’s interested in, or anyone.” He nodded. “Look up there. Yoko Ono didn’t break up the Beatles. She just fell in love w
ith someone who loved her back. And he just happened to be a Beatle. Look at the shit they went through together.” I kept picturing Jim holding his hand up, that little shake of his head.

  “And now she’s probably in some stupid emergency room, all alone,” I added, appreciating the feeling, a small tear in my heart, bleeding out, with no one to tell.

  “I don’t know what Carson’s doing out in the parking shelter, but I pointed out Jim’s car,” Lewis said. “We might wanna get out of here. I’m sure this is all over the radio.”

  “Lewis! Jeez, you guys!” I punched his chest, tight, with the butt of my hand, as we held each other. “Grow up,” I said. “I have stuff in there. And I’ve got the keys!”

  “Damn!” he said, and looked down for a second, then tried studying the room, but his eyes were always drawn back to the TV. “Okay,” he said, finally, trying on a face like the one he wore before the wrestling match months ago. “We’re going to sit down with Jim, as if we just happened to be here. If Carson wanders in, I’ll distract him.” He started, and I had the choice to walk away or join him, which wasn’t really a choice at all.

  We walked deeper into the lounge and over to Jim’s table, where he pretended not to see us. Eventually, without any other option, he looked up, eyes wide in fake surprise as we sat down. All three of us simmered in silence.

  “I’m leaving with Lewis,” I said to Jim after a minute. Some of his initial alarm was gone, and he listened, clenching his jaws. “I gotta get my bag from your car and I’ll leave the keys in that magnet box.” He’d shown it to me, hidden in a wheel well, saying he was going to put a set there for me one day. “I understand that you can’t walk me out. We’ll pretend we bumped into you.” He tried to keep neutral, but a few tears slid down his cheek. He didn’t wipe them away. Maybe they were for John Lennon.

  “How can you even be crying?” Lewis said to Jim. “You and your fucked-up family have been casually ruining people’s lives for years. That’s what makes this possible. This asshole who just killed John Lennon? He just wants to advertise how powerful he is. What a big, strong man. Sound familiar?”

  Jim leaned forward, his knuckles on the table. “Only a few more months, you little turd,” he said, grimacing. “You won’t be going to school anymore, and you’ll be an adult. Better hope I don’t find you somewhere alone.”

  “But you don’t like adults, Jim,” Lewis said, and he gave him the same kind of face pat Jim used to give to him at the garage. “In fact, you prefer people who aren’t. A lot of people know that?” Jim’s cheek muscles jumped. A look passed between them.

  “I’m not afraid of you, anymore,” Lewis said. “Or your asshole nephew who has to send grown men to fight boys. You’re both just a couple of pathetic losers. You’re so sad you can’t even find a woman your own age who wants to spend time with you, let alone sleep with your sad, pathetic loser ass.”

  I grabbed Lewis’s hand away before he could use Jim’s old trick back on him, finishing that pat in a real slap. He didn’t know Jim like I did.

  Or maybe he knows him better, the New Voice said.

  “See you around, Jim,” Lewis said, more confident than I’d ever seen him. We stood up and left the lounge.

  December 8, 11:49 p.m.

  “No!” a stranger’s voice shouted from behind me. I turned, and in that second, I knew I shouldn’t have. Custard jumped from the front and the stranger crashed into me from behind. I guessed it was Jim, whose face I now recognized. We all whaled on each other, landing random punches. For all my badass talk, I’d never been in a real brawl.

  A real punch to the face is not like what you see in movies. You feel the knuckles. I don’t know whose, but I got clocked a few times, mostly wild swings popping my cheeks. I was going to have a black eye, maybe two. Suddenly, one of those guys was off. Jim. Lewis must have slammed him in the gut and now they were tangling together to the side.

  I scrambled up, and when Custard tried to do so next to me, I rested a boot heel on his right hand. He struggled, attempting to get his hand free. Was he going for his jacket pocket?

  “Don’t move if you wanna keep your trigger finger,” I growled. He moaned and started to move, and I loosened my foot suddenly as I saw the bloodied crushed stone underneath him.

  Then I realized it wasn’t blood. It was the stones Derek had sprayed red. I flashed to Lennon, probably surrounded by a similar pool, only real, as he took his last breaths on that sidewalk in New York City. How had that happened? Didn’t he have security? Had he gotten too confident? I pictured Derek, staggering to my car, driving it the twenty minutes from Lockport hoping he’d reach home and not pass out, rather than call me for help. I thought of all the ways terrible things could and did happen, every day. And the way I could make this scumbag understand what it meant when you really chose to inflict harm on another person.

  I lifted my boot fully and gave Custard a hard kick in the ass. He fell back on his belly and crawled away. He got up finally by his van and turned around to glare at me.

  “You’re gonna know real violence, someday,” Custard snarled. He reached into his jacket pocket, but came out only with a set of keys. “Your kind always do—just you wait and see.”

  “Your kind too,” I said, but he was already peeling away, red dust kicking up in his wake.

  I turned away to investigate the noise coming from behind me. Lewis was now straddling Jim’s back and squeezing his thighs together, digging into his sides. He raised both fists above his head, about to box Jim’s ears. I just watched. The guy deserved a little pain from Lewis.

  Jim arched his back, trying to stand, to throw him like a bronco, and Lewis grabbed at the guy’s collar to hang on. I had this weird burst of Albert at the Sanborn Field Day, and then flashed on Jim’s face. He was the guy who helped me get Albert out of that Beer Tent. I could kick his ass, literally, or poke the insides of his elbows, and he’d go down with Lewis on top of him. He’d never see me coming.

  “Stop it! You jerks!”

  That scream, Maggi, reverberated across the shelter and froze us all. Impossibly loud, her voice blasted out of her tiny rib cage and echoed off the corrugated tin shelter ceiling, like a high-powered guitar effects pedal. “Didn’t any of you learn anything tonight! Grow up!” I looked at her for a second, then whipped my head back to the action.

  Lewis and Jim slowly circled each other, both locked in, a little bloody and resigned. Lewis looked ready to go ahead, knowing it was going to cost him, but Jim looked wary at me over Lewis’s shoulder. Lewis had already landed a few shots too. Jim understood that he’d be fighting us both and that he could come out bad. Unbelievably, though, before they could start anything, the PA started piping in “Give Peace a Chance.” But it wasn’t John Lennon—it was like a thousand terrible voices. The TV reporter said it was a crowd gathering outside the Dakota, singing, a sudden memorial.

  We all looked up at the corrugated metal ceiling as Maggi joined us, Lewis and Jim pulling slightly away from each other. I couldn’t read her expression—was she mad?—so I put my arm around Lewis. The places where his leather jacket had been mended were torn again, the newer threads broken.

  “We’re done here, buddy,” I said, lifting a flap of leather. “C’mon, I’ll fix this for you.” The old me would have tried to convince him to leave it, because it would be badass. But Lewis liked things to at least seem neat on the outside, even if they were batshit crazy on the inside. “Better this time. I promise. For you. Let’s go home.”

  “You remember what I told you,” Jim said, scowling at Lewis as he joined me. “Better hope I don’t find you alone.”

  “You better hope you don’t,” Lewis said back, and Jim suddenly got that vaguely fearful look again. I had no idea what they were talking about—there was some part of that story I was missing—but it didn’t seem to matter. Lewis wasn’t the stronger fighter, and he’d taken the worst of their scuffle physically, but he’d gotten this guy somehow. He had won.

 
“You coming, Maggi?” I said as we walked to the Chevelle. We didn’t even bother keeping an eye on Jim.

  December 8, 11:59 a.m.

  “You guys go,” I said, with the strongest steel voice, one I almost never used. Well, no more. “Just go! I’ve got a ride here.” I looked at Jim, deciding to be clear. “To the Rez.” He pursed his puffy, split lip. I snapped my eyes, and he understood, nodding and lowering his head.

  “Hey,” Carson said, staring at me, standing in some gravel that I swore seemed to have blood on it. He tried coming closer, but I stepped back. “We came all this way to—”

  “I make my decisions on my own, Carson! Not because you came down here, doing whatever dumb-ass thing you were planning.” That was what I’d wanted to say, but by itself, it sounded too … something, given what had happened tonight. “Thank you, though, for thinking you were doing the right thing.” I looked again at the gravel, and I saw the shattered red plastic behind Jim’s Bandit.

  “Paint,” Carson said. “Not … something else.” I pointed to the plastic. “Yeah, taillight too.”

  “Even wrongheaded, thank you too, Lewis.” I turned to him. “For everything.”

  “You sure about this?” Lewis asked, giving me his no-bullshit eyes. “Want us to follow?”

  “If you’re really my friend, you won’t,” I said, which wouldn’t sit well with him. “I can call your house when I get home. Let it ring once.” I said that as much for Jim as for them, to let him know I wasn’t changing my mind. If he didn’t want to take me home, he should say so now, but I’d prefer that we get a chance to talk. The boys got in Carson’s car and slowly pulled away.

  “We’re not going to the hotel,” Jim said once their taillights had disappeared. He tried to say it firm, like he wanted it to be a decision and a question. Still thinking he was going to sleep with me tonight. Unbelievable! I wondered if he was even starting to get aroused as easily as he usually did, and this time, as I thought it, I got a different shiver. It was no longer excitement.