Hi Five

by Joe Ide

  She didn’t see him again until two weeks later at a friend’s exhibition in Albuquerque. She was surprisingly glad to see him and he obviously felt the same. They hugged and held on a moment longer than necessary. Afterward they went for a walk, had dinner and talked for a long time. He walked her to her car and kissed her. A sweet kiss. A just-right kiss. Grace was wary by nature, sometimes bordering on paranoia. Rebecca told her, “Trust requires practice, and in those terms you’re a lazy bum.”

  She wondered if Noah would be another in a long line of losers. A man who talked a good game, seemed to be good-hearted but turned out to be a grown-up adolescent, a mama’s boy or an egocentric asshole who talked constantly while the world revolved around his head. How could you know? It was a fantasy to think that you could. You made the jump and whatever happened happened. Anyway, she was independent, comfortable with her sexuality and in need of male companionship. It had nothing to do with Isaiah. Waiting until she was more trusting was like waiting for retirement. She went over to Noah’s place. He opened the door. She looked at him a lingering moment, he smiled, and she went inside.

  She spent a lot of time at the old adobe house Noah had rented. It was bigger and cooler than her cramped apartment. He was neat, thank God, considerate and good in bed. He worked hard. She liked him a lot. They became a couple. People invited them places together. She assumed he would call every day. Her mother liked him. Sometimes she thought there might be a future with him, something she hadn’t thought about until she’d met Isaiah. But he was there and she was here. Sometimes she couldn’t conjure up his face and at others she could feel him inside her and remember every word he’d said.

  Noah became part of her routine, part of her life. Sure, he had his moments. A jealous rant about another artist. A bout of feeling sorry for himself. A dismissal of something she said. But they were brief, he apologized and they went on.

  Noah was preparing for an exhibition, a one-man show at a prestigious gallery. He painted in a frenzy, staying up until three a.m., losing weight and brooding, rife with self-doubt. Every now and then he’d snort a few lines of coke. She was okay with it; she did it herself. The exhibition was a huge success, nearly all his paintings sold. His notoriety spread. He had money. He got an agent.

  He bought clothes that were new but looked vintage. He grew a beard. He didn’t listen anymore. He waited until she was done talking, like a plane had flown past, and then launched into something about himself. He got another show and bragged about it. He snorted more coke and stayed out late with his friends. He was critical of her work and gave her a lot of advice. She put up with it for a while. Sometimes you do that because you don’t want to admit you’ve wasted so much time and emotion. One night, he was high and yelled at her for not cleaning up his part of the studio. He had commitments, he had deadlines—didn’t she understand that? She told him to fuck off forever, gathered her things and went back to her apartment.

  She chided herself for missing the signs and not leaving sooner. Once again, she’d seen a man not for himself but what she hoped he would be. She forgave herself. It takes time to find that out. Rebecca said this wasn’t an indictment of trust, but Grace wasn’t so sure. Noah called, came around and sent a lot of emails but she didn’t answer her door or respond.

  She thought about Isaiah and wondered why she’d wasted her time with anybody else. “You love him, you stupid bitch,” she said to the bathroom mirror. On the day she left New Mexico, Noah came over. He said he was sorry for the way things had ended and that he’d been an asshole. He asked her to take a duffel bag with her. He was going on a trip to get his head straight and there was no room on his bike. He would stop in LA to pick it up. She knew it was a ruse to see her again but said yes so he’d leave.

  Noah took a sip of coffee, put the mug down and didn’t pick it up again. “Are you painting?” he asked.

  “Only a little,” she said. “I have to find a space.” She waited for him to talk about his amazing new work or upcoming show in Miami or New York but he didn’t. He seemed mellower, more relaxed and not high. “What?” he said.

  “Nothing. Are you moving here?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said with a sigh. “I’m staying with a buddy for a few days. I’ve been at loose ends, sort of. That self-doubt thing.”

  “You have self-doubts?” she said with a little laugh.

  “Yeah,” he said with a little laugh himself. “My massive ego started cracking right after you left and then it fell apart completely. I was a mess.” He looked at his brown hands. “I’m sorry for what happened. It was my fault completely.”

  “Forget about it.”

  “No, let me say this. I should have said it to you a long time ago. I was pigheaded and arrogant and you were far more patient than you needed to be. Thanks for that. And I’m clean, by the way.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. “I’ve always wished you well.”

  He got up. “I’ll get out of your hair.” He gave her a brief hug. “I hope we see each other again.”

  She didn’t answer and he left.

  She was in Isaiah’s backyard, painting. She needed new ideas. She needed to make progress. Seeing Noah sparked it. He was so good it made her jealous. Usually she started with a shape or a color or some vague emotional impulse, going wherever her instincts led her. But she’d decided it was kind of a cop-out. How do you know you’re growing if you have no intention to? It was like kids with finger paints. They painted whatever and whatever was fine. She had never started a painting thinking about an objective or an idea. Whenever she managed to capture something truthful it was happenstance, like closing your eyes and hitting an RBI. Today, she had restrained her ambition to depict the whole of human nature and decided to paint Ruffin, or rather, the feeling of Ruffin—his innocence, his purity, his pleasure at a scratch behind the ear, his complete contentment doing nothing more complicated than lying under the lemon tree.

  It took some experimenting but she was onto something. She’d found the colors and visualized the composition. After some experimenting, it started to flow, becoming less cerebral and more a direct connection from the paintbrush to her feelings for the dog.

  Isaiah came out the back door. He was brooding and troubled. Again. She put down her brush and waited. He’d speak when he was ready.

  “I’ve got nothing,” he said. “Really nothing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Grace was deflated. She felt silly, painting a dog—the feeling of a dog—while he was working on a complex problem with someone’s future at risk. She looked at him. He’d gone still, in the zone. She waited. He stood up straighter and made a face like he’d stepped out of a warm room into a cool breeze.

  He smiled and said, “The guns.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Deagle

  Angus watched Hugo, Lowell and Johnny mount his new baby on the jeep. The fucking thing was beautiful. Looking at it scared the shit out of you. Whoever designed this thing was a goddamn maniac. Yes, this would be fitting for the Last Big Deal. A high note to go out on; the Top Gun still on top.

  “This motherfucker is badass,” Hugo said, grinning.

  “It sure is,” Angus said, grinning back.

  Angus used to rationalize about his business. If the narcos didn’t kill people with guns they bought from him, they’d kill people with guns they bought from somebody else. Besides, you couldn’t control what a customer did once the gun was sold. If he went out and killed somebody that wasn’t your fault. Look at it this way. Suppose that same guy drove his Camry into a crowd at the bus stop. Would you blame Toyota? No, of course not. Guns don’t kill people, people do, and they kill them with all kinds of things. Knives, hammers, tire irons, baseball bats and bolt-action deer rifles. The blame lies with the bearer. True enough, Angus thought, as far as it went. But what you can’t do with any of those things is go into a classroom at an elementary school and slaughter all the children at the same time.

  And what w
as that other chestnut? Oh, yeah. That you needed an AR-15, a thirty-round clip and a thousand rounds of ammo to defend your family against—what exactly? The neighbors? Rioting minorities? An invading army from Canada?

  No. The real reason gun advocates believed they needed an arsenal was to defend themselves against the US government, when, in clear violation of the Second Amendment, its agents came to confiscate your guns. Angus shook his head whenever he heard some numbskull say that. Make no mistake, there were lots of people who wanted to see the guns confiscated, but nobody thought it was possible. Not Hillary, Michael Moore, Al Gore, Peter Pan or that lesbian on TV, Rachel something.

  There were three hundred million guns in the country. The government couldn’t confiscate three hundred million car keys—but okay, just for the sake of argument, how would the government implement that policy in say, oh, I don’t know—Compton or Dade County or Flatbush or Mack Avenue in Detroit? Give the gangbangers a Del Taco coupon in exchange for their Glocks and Mac 10s? And what would the government do about the countless guns that people would hide in their backyards, give to friends or bury in the desert? And did anybody really think the NRA’s thousands of members were going to voluntarily give up their weapons?

  Or how about this? How would the government get the guns out of Texas? Yeah, that sounds plausible. What would be the plan? Go from house to house, apartment to apartment, ranch to ranch? Get a couple of cops to ring the bell and say, “We need you to turn in your guns, sir,” and what if the guy says, “No, I don’t think I will.” Then what? Wake up a judge and get a search warrant? Get dozens of officers to set up a perimeter, evacuate the schools, call in the SWAT team and the helicopters and the armored vehicles every time someone resists? The only way to get the guns out of Texas is to nuke the place.

  Angus always wanted to tell the “cold dead hands” people they could let go of that fantasy. The government has no interest in confiscating your guns, and that means the small fortune you spent on the private arsenal in your basement should have gone toward a sun porch or your retirement account. But let’s say you’re a hard-ass and you’re going to stockpile weapons anyway. That’s fine, just be honest about it. You’re doing it because you want to, not because you need to.

  Not that Angus gave a shit. People would always want guns and people would always sell them no matter what the government did or didn’t do. There was no stopping the arms trade or even slowing it down and if you’re a ball bearing somewhere in that wheel, don’t be a pussy. Accept your part in it. It disgusted Angus when he heard gun people try and weasel out of their responsibilities. If you profited from a product manufactured specifically to kill people you were, to one degree or another, culpable, and if you can’t handle it, take an immunity pill from human suffering and get on with your fucking business.

  Isaiah drove. Angus owned property out near Barstow, a vast tract of desert, nothing on it but scrub brush and brown foothills. He used the place to demonstrate his wares to prospective customers. Isaiah was usually watchful no matter where he was. There was always something to learn or at least observe but a black fog of guilt had clouded the landscape. Guilt. There was always something to feel guilty about. He didn’t think he was unique in that way but he wondered if other people suffered from so much of it. Supposedly, guilt was useful, a deterrent to harming others, but most of the time it arrived too late, after the harm was done. Stella, he thought. He had to warn her about Angus but how could he do that without distracting her from the music? How could she focus on the Vivaldi with the threat of crushed fingers and the end of her career? He called her. He’d think of something. He was good on his feet.

  “Isaiah! How are you?” Stella said. She sounded happy. Joyful even.

  “I’m okay,” he said, trying to put a smile in his voice. “How are things going?”

  “Wonderfully!” she said. Of course they are, he thought. She went on. “The conductor is very happy and so am I. I’m finding things in the piece I didn’t know were there. It’s exhilarating!” The temperature in the car hadn’t changed but he was sweating. You’re so fucked, Isaiah.

  “That’s great, really great,” he said. Tell her, Isaiah. Tell her! His entire vocabulary had vanished. In an awful moment, he realized he was quick on his feet but not with words. Could he really destroy her innocence? Her vibrancy. Her life?

  “Hello? Are you still there?” she said. Tell her, Isaiah. Tell her!

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I, uh, was just calling to say hi and to, um, wish you luck.” You’re a coward, you truly are.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “You sound funny.”

  “No, I’m good, I’m fine. I’m really happy for you.”

  “Can’t wait to see you!”

  “Yeah, me too!” he yodeled.

  The call ended. He wanted to get out of the car and run over himself.

  Angus had replaced his Maybach with an identical one. It was parked in a clot of other cars and pickup trucks that belonged to the Starks. A white stallion amid a herd of nags. Isaiah parked and got out of the Kia. The looks he got from the gang members weren’t dirty; they were blackened with fecal matter and studded with dagger points.

  There wasn’t much here. A metal roof over a row of shooters’ tables. About two dozen people firing rifles and handguns. There were heavy sheets of fiberboard painted with people of various ethnicities and sexual preferences. Most of those were blown to shit. There were paper targets on wooden posts, metal ones shaped like a feral hog or turkey, long-range targets hanging like dinner plates. With everybody shooting, the sound was one long barrage. That was another thing the movies got wrong. Guns are loud, louder than a thunderclap, scare-the-shit-out-of-you loud, each round packing enough decibels to put a long-term hurt on your eardrums. The shooters had ear protection. Isaiah had to stand away just to make it bearable. Fumes from the smokeless powder were heavy. They smelled and tasted a little like fireworks; the mercury fulminate in the primer gave it a metallic edge. People thought it was Cordite but Cordite was a brand name for a gunpowder that hadn’t been used in sixty years.

  Isaiah leaned against Sidero’s truck. Since the last time he’d seen it, Sidero had put on new tires. It had a big cab. The space behind the front seats was crammed with random piles of stuff. Clothes still on their hangers, a juicer, DVDs in a box, fishing poles, a laundry basket full of shoes, a TV, a couple of rifles, a basketball, a space heater, stereo speakers and a jumble of other things.

  Isaiah had been curious about Sidero’s name. It sounded ethnic and Sidero’s skin was a little dark for a white guy. Isaiah had looked the name up. Kevin Boyd was right. The name was Latin. It meant “evil nymph.” Appropriate, Isaiah had thought.

  Since he’d confronted Christiana in the shop, Isaiah had become skeptical about the alters as killers. They were so at odds with each other and Gia said they argued about everything. Collusion seemed unlikely. And really, Christiana had minimal influence on the others. Isaiah was in a better position to get info than she was. In his desperation, he’d grabbed at straws and tried to make a bale of hay. He’d been thoroughly discouraged until the pieces of another idea snapped into place. He wished his thinking process was more linear; that he could coalesce the clues more quickly, but relevancy came to him as it pleased, without regard for urgency or timing. His new conclusion wouldn’t resolve the problem of exonerating Christiana, but he was in the hunt, and despite all his protestations about the case, he was excited. He was IQ and he was doing his job.

  He felt sorry for Christiana and the alters, victimized by their father and facing the possibility of prison time for something they possibly didn’t do. Even if the threat to Stella was removed, Isaiah would have still carried on. He wanted very much to prove the alters innocent. He felt for victims. He felt their suffering and bewilderment and fear. Grace told him he felt too much. It was one thing to recognize the pain of others, it was another thing to try it on for size.

  The red-haired woman Isaiah had seen
at the Den was apparently a gun enthusiast. She was wearing full camo and yellow shooting glasses, firing a mint, pre-ban, Polytech AK assault rifle with an extended clip and a huge sniper scope, the ventilated barrel resting on a small tripod. A weird combination. An assault rifle was a short- to medium-range weapon. If shooting at a distance, why not use a sniper rifle like a Barrett .300 or an M24? Just something to do, Isaiah thought. If you weren’t actually killing niggers and Mexicans, what else could you do with a gun like that except pretend to shoot niggers and Mexicans from far away?

  Set next to the tripod was a spotting scope to check the cluster. A ballistic chronograph was in front of the barrel. It consisted of two triangular antennae that extended from a small electronic device. Fire through the triangles and the device measured bullet velocity so you would know how fast the round was going when it passed through the burglar’s lung. The red-haired woman loaded her own cartridges. She was serious. This was another thing Isaiah had never gotten into: gear. All that spandex and Gore-Tex and carbon fiber and breathability and sport-specific shoes and COOLMAX socks and gizmos to measure your vitals while you ran around the block. These days, it cost you a couple grand to just get on a bicycle.

  Isaiah didn’t see Angus around. Sidero and some others were trying out a “Deagle,” the Desert Eagle .50-caliber handgun. Isaiah eschewed guns but he knew a lot about them. The Deagle was so powerful you could shoot through a chimney, kill Santa, Rudolph and the guy in the next house. The .50-caliber round was the largest you were legally allowed to load into a handgun. Put the shell next to a .45 and it looked like Mr. Bullet taking his young son to kindergarten. Gangstas were into them as showpieces.