The Walk

by Lee Goldberg

  He ran screaming out from under the overpass, tripping again, rolling onto his back, turning in time to see a wave of fire sweeping across the top of the freeway, cars exploding like popcorn in its wake. The rumble he felt wasn’t an aftershock, it was a chain-reaction explosion rolling up the 110.

  The fire moved like water, washing over the freeway and then dissipating like it never existed at all, a blistering figment of Marty’s over-worked imagination. But he knew it wasn’t. Just one more unbelievable sight in a day already too full of them.

  Marty got to his feet and spotted Buck, his back to him, pissing against the cyclone fence of the half-finished, $150 million Belmont High School. If the bounty hunter saw the fire, it hadn’t made much of an impact on him, at least not one strong enough to ignore his bladder. He seemed much more interested in relieving himself on the most expensive high school in the world, its construction halted and abandoned mid-way through because somebody discovered it was built atop toxic waste. But at least the school was earthquake safe.

  Buck zipped up his fly and turned to see Marty. “I got a few notes on your running. First, tie your fucking shoes.”

  Marty looked down at his feet. Both shoes were untied. His glasses slid off his nose and shattered on the ground.

  “Second, you run like a pansy-ass fag,” Buck said. “Are you a pansy-assed fag?”

  “No,” Marty said, tying his shoes. “I’m married.”

  “To a woman?”

  “Yes, to a woman.”

  “Was she always a woman?”

  Marty glared at him, saw Buck’s gingivitis grin, and stomped on his glasses, grinding them into plastic crumbs.

  “That’s where I’m going,” Marty said, “back home to her. Where are you going?”

  “I’m going home, too.”

  They started walking again, side by side, down the nearly deserted street. Where was everybody? After a moment, Marty asked Buck: “Where’s home?”

  “Hollywood.”

  “You got anybody waiting for you?”

  Buck shook his head no.

  “So what’s your hurry?”

  Buck gave him a cold look. “Where the hell else would you go?”

  Marty turned his gaze ahead, where 1st Street rose again, this time as an arched, concrete overpass that stretched across Glendale Boulevard. It seemed intact, with one car stalled at the crest, but Marty wasn’t going to press his luck. He’d walk around the overpass and rejoin 1st Street on the other side of Glendale Boulevard.

  “What’s her name,” Buck asked.

  “Beth.”

  “What’s she do?”

  “She was an actress but she gave it up.”

  “Did I ever see her in anything?”

  “No.”

  “How the fuck would you know?” Buck snapped. “You know every show I’ve ever seen? Give me some titles.”

  Marty listed a few by rote. “They Eat Their Own 2, Summer Wine, The Endless Spiral.” Not the most illustrious resume, Beth would be the first to agree. Her most lucrative gig was an antacid commercial that ran off and on for years.

  “The Endless Spiral, was that the thing with Christopher Walken as the ghost assassin guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was she the girl Christopher Walken finger-fucked in the taxi?”

  Yes.

  “No,” Marty replied. It was after sitting through that unbearable scene, Christopher Walken sitting right next to them in the screening, that Marty finally agreed to have a child, on the condition she’d give up acting for a while and become a stay-at-home Mom.

  “I see a lot of bad fucking liars in my field,” Buck said, “and you are the fucking worst. How could you let some guy finger-fuck your wife?”

  “It was Christopher Walken and they were acting.”

  “That looked like a finger in her twat to me,” Buck said.

  “It was a stunt twat,” Marty said. “Can we just drop it?”

  Clearly Buck was enjoying himself too much to let it go, and he probably wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for the panic-stricken, Mexican man who ran up to them, babbling in Spanish. It was easy for Marty to just keep going and ignore him, but Buck stopped and answered the guy in what sounded remarkably like fluent Spanish. That stopped Marty for a moment, a moment he’d soon regret.

  He understood a few of the words-Boy, Car, Trapped-and looked again at the overpass.

  Marty saw now that the overpass wasn’t intact at all, it was split apart at the crest, a Toyota teetering over the jagged edge, tangled in the splintered rebar. The windshield was shattered, a body splattered on the street directly below the car.

  The driver should have worn a seat belt.

  Buck shoved him. “This guy says there’s a kid in that car up there, buckled in the seat, too fucking scared to move.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Marty said, starting to walk away. Buck grabbed him.

  “The guy needs our help to get the kid out.”

  Marty shook his head. “Do I look like Charlton Heston to you?”

  “What the fuck?”

  “I’m not a hero.” Marty turned away, and again Buck grabbed him.

  “Maybe I’m not making myself fucking clear here. There’s a kid alone in that car up there. He’s trapped.”

  “So are a thousand other kids in this city. Am I supposed to save each one of them?”

  Buck let go of Marty and looked him right in the eye. “You are going to save this one.”

  “No,” Marty said. “I’m going home.”

  He adjusted his gym bag on his shoulders, turned his back to Buck, and headed west. Molly was enough. More than anyone had a right to ask of him. He’d done his part, he didn’t have to do any more. His only obligation was to get home to his wife.

  Marty heard the click. The Dirty Harry click. The sound was almost subliminal. He knew what it was from a lifetime of vicarious experience. Although nobody had ever pointed a gun at him and cocked the trigger before, he’d heard it on TV so many times, he knew the sound instinctively.

  “Take one more step asshole and I’ll shoot you,” Buck said behind him.

  He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Yep, Buck was aiming a gun at him for the second time today. Behind Buck, the Mexican guy was waving his hands, jabbering in a desperate torrent of unintelligible Spanish, clearly afraid he’d been terribly misunderstood.

  Marty spoke clearly and slowly.

  “I’ve been through this already, Buck. That’s why my backpack was on fire. That’s how close I came to dying. You want to be a hero? Go for it. I hope you survive, but I can’t risk it again. I have to make it home, for my wife. That is my moral obligation. Okay?”

  But Marty didn’t get anything back from Buck and he’d be damned if he was going to argue about it. So Marty just started walking.

  And Buck shot him.

  Marty heard the unbelievably loud gunshot the same instant he felt the scorching punch in his shoulder, spinning him around and knocking him off his feet.

  His shoulder was burning. He touched the bloody tear in his jacket and, his ears still ringing, stared back at Buck incredulously. “You shot me?”

  “I grazed you,” Buck said. “Don’t be a pussy.”

  Marty’s fury overwhelmed his pain. “You don’t have any one, it doesn’t matter if you get killed trying to save everybody. There’s no one waiting for you, no one depending on you.”

  “That kid is,” Buck said. “Look around you, asshole. You’re alive. You have two good arms and two good legs. Your fucking obligation is to help everyone you see, whether you want to or not. So, you got a choice. You can die a hero trying to save that kid or you can die a coward right now. You decide.”

  Marty glanced up at the car, creaking in the breeze, then at the bloody lump on the pavement. In a few minutes, if he gave in, that could be him. Only with a car and maybe the entire overpass on him. Even the homeless were smart enough to flee from the fractured overpass, leaving behind their flea-rid
den mattresses, piles of soiled blankets, and plastic bags of garbage.

  The crumbling overpass, the swaying car, they were death traps. Attempting this rescue, without the necessary equipment or any experience, was suicide.

  It was like all those stories he’d read in the LA Times, the ones about people who drowned trying to save someone who fell through ice or got sucked under the sea by a riptide. Instead of one unfortunate person dying, three or four would-be rescuers inevitably sacrificed their lives as well.

  Those stories, buried in the bottom corner of the back pages, always struck Marty as sad, tragic, and stupid. He liked to think that if he were in one of those situations he’d know to choose survival over unthinking heroism, no matter how wrenching that decision would be.

  But he’d never been in one of those situations.

  He also never had to make a decision at gunpoint before.

  It changed things.

  “Put the gun away.” Marty said.

  Buck kept it on him.

  “Put the fucking gun away,” Marty yelled. “I can’t think with that pointed at me.”

  “There’s nothing to think about.”

  “Do you know how to get the kid out without knocking the car over the edge? Do you, you fucking psychopath?” Marty stared at him, at the blank look on his face. “I didn’t think so.”

  Buck holstered his gun. “You got some rope in your pack. We’ll lower you down.”

  “First of all, that rope is for tying up a roll of electric cables, it’s not strong enough to hold a man,” Marty said. “Secondly, why am I the guy?”

  “Because you’re the lightest of the three of us,” Buck said. “And even if you weren’t, you’ve been shot in the arm.”

  “You said I was grazed.”

  “Stop being a pussy,” Buck said.

  Marty looked at the teetering car again, then down at the pavement, and the body splattered on it. His eyes drifted from the body to the pile of filthy blankets and he remembered something he saw on Cinemax late one night, one of those soft-core women-in-prison movies. The busty, sexually-adventurous convicts escaped using bed-sheets. It wasn’t a very secure prison, the guards weren’t too bright, but the girls were pretty resourceful and the principle was sound.

  Marty clutched his bloody shoulder and got up. “I got an idea. You’re going to have to find a few more people to help.”

  1:30 p.m. Tuesday

  The smell from the urine-starched blankets tied around his chest and wrapped under his shoulders was overpowering. If the drop didn’t kill Marty, the odor would.

  The bum’s blankets were tied together end-to-end and securely wound with Marty’s rope. The apparatus trailed behind him a few feet to Buck, Enrique, and half-a-dozen other survivors who held the other end as if preparing for a game of tug-of-war.

  Marty stood on the edge of the precipice, beside the Toyota, gathering his courage. The ticks, fleas, and lice were probably smart enough to abandon the blankets now. No sense taking a fall with this fool, a guy who mistook Caged Party Bimbos for an instructional video on urban rescues.

  “We’re ready,” Buck yelled.

  “I’m not,” Marty muttered, pulling his leather work gloves tight over his hands.

  The car was hanging by just one rear wheel, held in place by just a few pieces of twisted rebar. He couldn’t see the kid, the car was tipped too far forward, but he could hear him whining in terror.

  Marty had no idea what he was going to do, except not look down. He turned to the men holding the rope, strangers he didn’t know an hour ago and still didn’t know right now. He was entrusting them, and a make-shift rope made of a dozen soiled blankets, with his life.

  “You sure you can hold me?” Marty asked.

  “Two more seconds and I’ll push you,” Buck said. “Stop stalling. That car isn’t going to hold much longer.”

  Marty took a deep breath and moved right up to the edge. It was a long drop. Chances of survival if he fell were zero.

  “Shit,” he whispered, sitting down.

  He grabbed two pieces of rebar and slid slowly over the edge, bits of concrete shaking loose, falling into space and shattering on the street below.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  Marty slid a bit further, his legs dangling over the side. Soon there would be nothing for him to hold on to at all.

  “Do you have me?” he yelled.

  “Hurry the fuck up,” Buck grunted.

  Marty let go of the rebar and fell, screaming. The blanket dug into Marty’s armpits, jerking his shoulders up against his neck. But it held, stopping his fall, but jerking the cell phone out of his pocket. He dangled, spinning beside the car, making the mistake of looking down just as his cell phone shattered on the pavement.

  Oh God.

  Not only was he going to die, now he couldn’t call anyone to tell them about it.

  He reached out and touched the car to stop his spin, and that’s when he saw the kid, buckled into the front seat, eyes wide with horror, hands out in front of him, flat against the dashboard. The kid was black, maybe six or seven years old. He was staring at Marty like he was a big, vicious spider hanging outside the window.

  “Stay calm,” Marty said, “Don’t move.”

  As if the kid was going anywhere. What a dumb thing to say. But Marty couldn’t think of anything else. He wasn’t even sure how to get the kid out of there without tipping the car over. Opening the door was probably too risky. It could shift things too suddenly.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Franklin!” It came out as a scream.

  “Okay, Franklin, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to roll down the window.”

  The kid looked at him and shook his head, his teeth chattering in fright. No fucking way, not for this guy.

  “You have to,” Marty said, his voice cracking with fear. If he was counting on winning the kid over with his own courage, he could forget about it.

  The kid just kept shaking his head. “No!”

  “Listen, kid, I know how stupid and scared I look. Some jerk in a bunch of dirty blankets. You think you’d rather take your chances in the car.” From the expression on Franklin’s face, Marty knew he read the kid right. “But Franklin, the truth is, the car is going to fall and you will die. I may get you killed, too, but at least you will have tried to save yourself.”

  The kid looked at him, then looked forward, out the broken windshield at the ground below. Marty knew what he was thinking about. He was thinking about it, too.

  “What would he want you to do?” Marty asked.

  The blanket slipped a bit, shaking free more chunks of concrete. Marty inadvertently screamed again, grabbing at the air.

  “Stop fucking around!” Buck yelled from above.

  Something in Buck’s voice, perhaps the violence and anger, must have made a difference, because Franklin slowly rolled down the window. The car swayed and creaked as he slightly shifted his weight. Marty gently reached into the open window and held the door to steady himself. He could see that Franklin had wet his pants. Marty didn’t blame him.

  “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to unbuckle yourself, grab hold of my arm, and I’m going to slowly pull you out.”

  Franklin stared at him. “I can’t.”

  “You have to, Franklin.” Marty said. “I won’t drop you. I promise.” He hoped it was a promise he could keep. His mind immediately, uncontrollably flashed to that horrific, opening scene in Cliffhanger.

  Franklin must have seen the doubt skirt across Marty’s eyes. “I want to wait for the firemen.”

  They were losing valuable seconds. And the longer Marty dangled, the more terrified Marty was becoming. What little resolve he had was fading fast and so was the strength of the men holding him. Marty imagined what the audience was seeing and he wasn’t, the loose knots slowly becoming unfurled, the blanket ripping on the sharp edge of concrete. And they would all be screaming, why doesn’t that dumb fucking
idiot do something?

  “Franklin, there are no firemen. There will never be any firemen. I am it. Now get out of the goddamn car.”

  The kid started crying again, but he unbuckled his belt. Franklin immediately fell forward against the dash, the car teetering suddenly with the shift in weight. Marty reached in, grabbed the back of Franklin’s shirt with both hands, and yanked with all his strength just as the Toyota pitched forward, falling free.

  Franklin dangled from Marty’s hands, his shirt riding up his body, his legs kicking in open space, as the car flipped end-over-end and smacked into the ground below. Marty and the kid were both screaming now, spinning in the air, hanging in terror.

  God, the kid was heavy. Marty had never held anything so heavy, it felt like the kid was tearing his arms from his sockets, ripping tendons, shredding muscles. He couldn’t possibly hold him another second.

  The kid grabbed Marty and hugged him tightly, his face pressed against Marty’s legs, muffling his cries. But Marty screamed loud and hard, from the bottom of his lungs, enough for both of them.

  Buck and Enrique pulled them up onto the overpass and dragged them a few feet from the edge before letting go. The kid broke free of Marty the second they were safe and ran, sobbing. Enrique chased after him, caught him, and pulled him into a hug.

  Marty sat up, pulling the piss-soaked blankets off as fast as he could. Buck offered him his hand. Marty swatted it away.

  “Get away from me,” Marty said, shakily getting to his feet. He was shivering all over. Buck reached out to him again and Marty punched him in the face.

  It wasn’t much of a punch, not much more than a slap, really. His fist was shaking too much to have any power behind it. But it was the first time Marty had swung at anyone since third grade. His pugilistic skills hadn’t improved any since then.

  Marty was as surprised by the punch as Buck was, but he didn’t regret it. Marty had never been so angry or so scared.

  Buck could easily have flattened Marty with a return blow. Instead, the big man just grinned.

  “Who taught you how to fight? The same clown who showed you how to run?” Buck said. “That’s got to change if you’re gonna pull off this hero shit.”