The Critical List

by Wenke, John;

  “No!” I screamed in this real squeaky voice. I must’ve sounded like my sister.

  “Ted! Stay cool!” my father ordered.

  The calm voice was back on the horn.

  “The cars are all gone now. It’s time, Doug, for a little chat.”

  The flashing lights were gone.

  “Shut up down there!” my father yelled. “I’m busy.”

  “Doug, he’s my father.” I was bawling, sniffling, like a baby. “Kill your own damn father but leave mine alone!”

  The snot was all gluey in my nose. I couldn’t breathe through my swollen throat.

  “Take it easy, Ted,” my father said. “Nothing like that’s going to happen. Now, Doug, I want you to think of something. When I was in Nam, I went into a tunnel and found myself face to face with a gun. It was one of our own M-16s. Captured, I might add. Charlie pulled the trigger and the gun jammed. Before I could free my arm and toast him, he was gone. I crawled on through, blew up the hole, and figured I was charmed. I did a lot of crazy things and never got scratched. Now what I want to know is, are you going to do what Charlie didn’t?”

  Doug actually shivered. The gun drooped. But in no time, he had it snug to the side of his head.

  “Mr. Starling, I can’t stand it. One guy at school said I got born out of my father’s asshole. Another guy said being a fag’s hereditary. I can get married all I want and have kids and all that, but one day I’ll wake up and be queer. I’ll come out of the closet, like Dad did. I don’t want”—Doug looked like he was going to cry—“to be—like that.”

  “That’s just talk,” my father said, “empty talk. Those guys are giving you the business. They smell a certain weakness and then bam! Guys used to needle me all the time because I was pin-toed. They said I looked like a pigeon trying to trip over its own feet. When I was seven or eight, I couldn’t talk right. The words came out all messed up. This big fat kid next door—he was ten or eleven—used to call me ‘Mouthful of Stewed Tomatoes.’ Like it was my name. The words always hurt. You have to accept the fact that people will talk. But it’s only talk.”

  I didn’t know where Dad was getting this stuff. He wasn’t pin-toed, and I’d never heard a thing about his mushy mouth.

  “Having a father like I got,” Doug said, “is more than talk. He’s moving out to live with this twenty-five-year old fairy. Dad’s probably got AIDS. Queers get AIDS.”

  “Things have changed and people aren’t getting AIDS so much anymore, but you never know. Why don’t you stick around and see what’s going to happen. Maybe he’ll get sick in other ways. You never know. You need to be around and see what happens. Shooting him’s not what you want to do. Being shot’s not so bad. It’s quick, except for the ones left behind. But it’s easy on the spirit. I’ve watched guys die from gunshots. They get real cold and drift off to sleep.”

  “That’s why I’m going this way.” Doug tapped the side of his head with the gun. “It’ll be easy on my spirit.”

  My father gulped. He realized he’d made a mistake.

  “The big thing is, you’d let your father off the hook. You should give yourself another chance and maybe you’ll find that there are other things you can do.”

  Doug laughed.

  “After this, he won’t let me get near him.”

  “I think he will.”

  Doug laughed again.

  “He’s not that stupid.”

  “Sure, he is. Fathers can be fools. If you give it a little time, he’ll think you got it out of your system. The best thing to do is to let a little time go by. It’ll lull him. He’ll get this idea that you’ve forgiven him. He’ll have the crazy thought that you’ve adjusted.”

  Doug smiled. “You think that’s the way to go?”

  “Absolutely. See what happens. Live to see what happens and then you can act accordingly.”

  “I like that. I can act accordingly. While I’m at it, maybe I can think of something good for Wayne. Wayne’s a major problem here. I can think about that while I’m at it.”

  Doug tossed the gun on the bed. It bounced. Rather than snatching it up, like I wanted to, my father just looked at it with sad, faraway eyes. I would’ve grabbed the gun myself, except my father started talking weird.

  “Look at it this way. Waiting for your chance is a better life than death. The thought of killing your father—people shut it up inside themselves, but it’s something to look forward to, plan for. I’ve done it myself a million times.”

  Dad must’ve been blowing more smoke. What I’m saying is, he didn’t have a father around to kill. My grandfather died when my father was eleven or twelve. I don’t know what he died of. When I’d asked about it, my father always said, “He just died,” and my mother said, “Don’t ask. He’ll tell you someday.” They were both weird about it, so I stopped asking.

  Dad has this little wooden box with about twenty black and white and color pictures of him and his father. He keeps the box in the top of his bedroom closet. He showed the pictures to me once. They were simple shots—the two of them with baseballs and bats and footballs. They’d be at the park or on the beach. That kind of stuff. There was nothing in any of them to give you the idea of murder. There was nothing strange about any of them, except once, through a crack in the bedroom door, I caught sight of my father sitting on the bed, the box in his lap, and all these pictures spread out over the blanket like cards. They were laid out like he was playing solitaire. And he was just staring at them without moving. He didn’t look like he wanted to kill anything. He only looked like he couldn’t move.

  House Arrest

  For the second morning in a row, from his sister’s screened side porch, Hedge watched them round the corner on their crooked noisy march to the bus stop, those teenage goofs with their funny hair—greased-up spikes sticking straight up, razor-shaved bald around the sides, draggle-tailed tufts fluttering below their necks.

  It irritated Hedge; they were out, and he was in.

  Hugging himself, Hedge rocked back from the table and spied the perfect perch: what a gas it would be to sit up on that limb and fire a few warning rounds at their feet. A little dancing dust to make the Stooges bolt.

  There was Moe, stomping the skateboard like a mini-teeter-totter, clack and clack, flopping edge to edge in a fitful travesty of forward motion. Occasionally, as he stumbled, Moe hefted his weight and let the board glide in swooping circles and half-moon arcs, dipping low, not quite wiping out but wrenching out of his loop to clack back into his skateboard strut. Right behind him, lumpy Larry plodded, shouldering a boom box the size of a small trunk. From the speakers blasted a percussive assault—guitar strangulation and vocal slaughter, the heavy metal wreck of suicide music. It reminded Hedge of the tent wars back in Nam—the humping shelling of Motown jamming in a kickass firefight with the psycho-ricochet of Hendrix. Nobody cared. If you needed sleep, you slept. When you were awake, the tent wars helped: canned thunder crowded out The Fear. Currently in Brookfield, there was nothing to fear. There were only pests—the encroachment of industrial parks, the threat of luxury taxes, the slumping financial markets, the behavior of the neighborhood kids, smart-assed happy pests bopping through the streets at 7:13 a.m.

  In rehab, Hedge had become an early riser. It was one of the new fundamentals for making himself presentable. For some time (how long depended on what you wanted to count. The spasmodic excesses of his final spree? Or the accretion of lamentable episodes?) Hedge had been very unpresentable, a husband enraged with his wife, a father disgusted with his children, a war hero fed up with his country. Rising early made him work at enjoying life, to not expect too much, to tolerate boredom as well as pests. At least the Stooges were using up a good four minutes of his sentence.

  Now take Curly, Hedge mused. Curly was about as diverting as a poorly trained seal, nimble but not nimble enough. In his baggy flowery shorts, Curly danced in
the street, a human pogo stick, hopping on his left foot while his right foot tickled the air. From afar, he seemed to be poking his toe at nothing. Up close, just beyond the property line, the bit of nothing assumed shaped. Curly was kicking a hacky sack. Hedge’s boy had one. Neither bag nor ball, it resembled a lumpy pincushion. It didn’t bounce and wasn’t worth throwing. You couldn’t serve, bat or putt it. You could only dance with it.

  “Somebody ought to do something about them.”

  Hedge turned. His sister, Sharon Morgan, dressed in a long white silk robe, stood in the doorway that opened into the dining room. She was raking her short straight black hair with a blue towel. In family photos, Hedge and his sister were often mistaken for twins.

  “I can’t stand the noise. It flat-out isn’t right.” Hedge smiled: with the Stooges to pick at, maybe Sharon would let him slide. “I mean, what if you had a baby sick, or you worked nights?”

  “Nobody in this neighborhood works nights,” Hedge replied mildly. “This place is strictly nine to four.” By now, the heavy metal screed was fading away, a gnarled declension into nada.

  “That’s not the point, Al. It’s rude—invasive and rude.”

  Hedge swung his feet over the bench. Leaning forward, he faced Sharon, hands on knees, set, like he was ready to bolt.

  “I don’t think anyone ever asked them to turn it down. They look like considerate boys to me. They’re just a little deaf.”

  “They’re about as considerate as a dust storm.”

  “If you’d like,” Hedge sweetly suggested, “I’ll be happy to hash it out with them. I’ll invite them to the lawn.” Hedge was not allowed to step beyond the Morgan property line. In the penultimate phase of his sentence, he was under house arrest. “I’ll put it to them nice.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Your time’s almost up. Talking to those idiots will only get you excited.”

  “Excited” was Sharon’s word that covered and contained Hedge’s wildness. Calm, he was fine—a bit grumpy and sarcastic, somewhat detached, floating out of reach, but fine. Excited, he was a bomb—a testy tank of disruption, volatile, rash, trouble looking for trouble. It was her job, this solid month, to keep her brother calm. So far, Sharon had almost succeeded. Hedge had done his best to be a good boy. After all, if waking up strapped to a hospital bed under armed guard doesn’t make you want to be good—well, you might just as soon start a high-speed chase and slam a friendly wall. Get it over with quick and don’t take anybody with you.

  For kicks, the fat deputy sheriff had pulled his gun, poked the barrel into Hedge’s nose, farted real loud and said, “Don’t move, Al! You’re covered! Get it? Covered!” Hedge was up to his chin with an itchy blanket. He couldn’t remember much, just that final blur before the booze and pills socked in: Re Re, his wife, crossing in front of the bedroom TV, taking off her skirt, letting it drop. Her naked bum startles him: she had blue on when she came out of the shower. She goes shopping and comes home without any drawers.

  “What’d I do?” Hedge had groaned.

  Deputy Sheriff Weathers laughed and filled him in.

  After breaking Re Re’s nose, Hedge had dragged her down the steps. His kids jumped him. Chad, his fourteen-year-old boy, wound up with contusions and a broken arm. Cindy, his eleven year old girl, lost a molar. Hedge took off in his Blazer and figured to smash the front door of Tom Meyer’s house. Hedge had Meyer pegged as Re Re’s lover. The problem was he didn’t slam Meyer’s house at all. Tom Meyer hadn’t even been Re Re’s lover. Hedge’s boss was. Norm Costello owned the Chevy dealership where Hedge was then service manager. While Costello got off the hook, Meyer’s next-door neighbor didn’t. It was Pete Macavoy’s door that got in Hedge’s way. After climbing through the wrecked foyer, Hedge beat Macavoy all over the house.

  It took the cops ten minutes to get there—a neighbor 911-ed the crash—and another five to subdue Hedge.

  Fortunately for Hedge, who hadn’t wanted any help, Herm and Sharon Morgan rode the white horse of One Last Chance. They’d convinced Hedge to not sign or say anything. Sharon said she owed it to her parent’s memory to take care of her excitable older brother. The Morgans sprung for one of those expensive, famous lawyers who never totally lose. Soon, two counts each of Attempted Murder and Aggravated Assault melted into Disorderly Conduct. Drug Possession became the user-friendly DUI.

  In court, Alexander Bartram waved his wand and conducted a symphony. He trundled forth experts on Post Combat Stress Disorder. The jury bought it and the judge levied a contingent sentence: probation under treatment; resentencing if the terms of probation were violated.

  Three weeks in Vet detox weaned Hedge from the pills and booze. He then did six weeks in rehab. He gratefully accepted the brainwashing, the body building, the lectures, the films, the books, the counseling, and the art therapy. It was like being in summer camp with a lot of messed-up guys. His day was designed to vanquish idleness and raze the devil’s workshop. The problem was, the devil didn’t need a workshop. He only needed a little open space.

  “Relax,” Hedge smiled. “I was just kidding. I wouldn’t bother with them. Maybe somebody should call the cops.” He shrugged but couldn’t quite bite back that smirking laugh. Something was playing in the devil’s amphitheater—Hedge could see himself karate-kicking Moe from the skateboard, smashing Larry’s box with a baseball bat, stuffing Curly’s hacky sack down his throat.

  “You think they’re funny,” Sharon huffed, “and why not? They’re just like you. No respect for anybody.”

  Hedge frowned, sincerely. Sharon was still sore. He had let her down.

  “I have respect. I’ve straightened myself out.”

  “You were a disgrace. You ruined dinner.”

  Last night had been Hedge’s opportunity to mix with “normal society.” The problem was not dinner but the guest list.

  Joe Solomon was a blowhard, his wife a worshipful cackler. The third guest was Judy Starnes, a shattered neighbor from two doors down, a rubbery-faced, painted, pushy woman of fifty. Three weeks ago, she had been dumped by her husband of twenty-seven years. From the start, Judy Starnes put him on edge. Flouncing, forward, all touchy-feely, faking lightheadedness after three sips of wine, Judy laughed overloud at Solomon’s dumb jokes and then draped tickling fingers around Hedge’s neck. He started craving a single shot of the Jack.

  “It was Solomon’s fault. He pushed me.”

  “It was personally and professionally embarrassing. Utterly offensive.”

  Joe Solomon was the top producer in Sharon’s office. Last year, he managed to unload eight million dollars’ worth of overpriced homes.

  “I’m sorry, but that 2-S slug acted like he knew about Nam.”

  “So what! He likes to talk. Salesmen talk. You should’ve just screened it out. I thought you were making progress, but now I’m worried. At the end of next week, you’re time’s up. I’m afraid you won’t be ready.”

  “I’ll be ready. But you gotta see how it rubbed me the wrong way when he said my Silver Star wasn’t nearly as good as the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

  “You need to tolerate what you don’t like.”

  Hedge was grateful when Herm stuck his cheerful, freshly shaven face out the dining room door. Tall and handsome with receding temples and a square jaw, Herm was general manager of the Brookfield Centre Mall.

  “I’m firing up the griddle. How about omelets all round?”

  Herm’s offer was swallowed by silence.

  “Hey, if that’s a problem, I’ll save the cheese and just scramble the suckers.”

  “Omelets would be wonderful, dear.” The starch in Sharon’s voice made Hedge itch. “Just give us a few more minutes. We’re getting something straight.”

  “Yeah,” Hedge blurted, not sure where it was coming from, “we’re reminding me I’m an asshole.” Hedge then laughed. Behind his wife’s
back, Herm winked, gave him one thumb up and pulled his head back into the house.

  “It’s no joke!” Sharon snarled.

  “I know. I’m just admitting the truth.”

  “You were worse than that.”

  “So was Solomon! He’s the guy doesn’t believe in the rehabilitation of criminals. I’m the exception proves the rule.”

  “He shouldn’t have said that.”

  “He’s a Nazi with that stuff about surplus population!”

  Hedge had taken it all personally. He couldn’t help but see himself as part of the surplus population.

  “What he meant was we have to take world population seriously. We have limited resources.”

  “I lost it when he mentioned castration.”

  “You see this knife?” Hedge screams, hauling back from the table, standing. “You see this knife?” He machete-slashes the air, grabs the leg of his Cornish hen and buries the knife. “You can’t do castration without cutting flesh!” Hedge withdraws the knife and stabs the hen in the back. For emphasis.

  “How could we eat after what you did? It was savage.”

  Hedge stifled a laugh. The jungle dog had surrendered.

  “You ruined dinner. After your explosion he hardly said two words.”

  “I know. We had a nice meal.”

  During breakfast, Hedge repressed his rage and played the abject sinner—all sorry as hell and swollen with future resolves. Frumpy and imperious, Sharon ate her omelet. Herm worked hard to smooth the wrinkles, covering news, weather, sports, making certain as he patted his lips with a napkin to remind Hedge to fill out that application. Herm had paved the way for Hedge to start right in as assistant service manager at the mall’s Sears Auto Center.

  When the Morgans left for the day, Hedge was still steaming. They could get the pills and booze out of Hedge, but they couldn’t quite get at the rage.

  He went to the recreation room and broke into his twirling dance. For a good thirty seconds, Hedge stomped, spun, kicked, and jabbed. One day in group, the guys had all been invited to try Primal Scream Therapy. With frantic joy, they let everything out—aaagh! and aggghhhh! It was fun, this stuff, but it made Hedge feel psycho. It was like running naked in the wind—good for you but dangerous. With the doctor’s consent, Hedge substituted his twirling dance.