Now They Call Me Gunner

by Thom Whalen

  * * *

  The next day, Wednesday, I wanted nothing more than to tell Randal that I wasn’t up to another trip to Syracuse to confront Warts Weber. I didn’t want to see her again. I didn’t want to feel threatened by the apron-clad gorilla who watched over her. I didn’t want to buy drugs from her.

  I would have told Randal all that, but I couldn’t. Not when I’d let Katie down the day before. I would have let her get gang raped. I felt sick to my stomach every time I thought about it. I would have just sat there and watched the Road Snakes destroy her. I had to prove to myself that I wasn’t a coward. At least, not all the time.

  Randal needed his door gunner and that was me. Even if I was unarmed and useless.

  “You think we should get some guns?” I asked as I mounted my bike.

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Not unless you want to get shot. You aren’t suicidal are you?”

  “No. If we get guns then we can protect ourselves if someone threatens us.”

  “You ever shoot anybody?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You ever shoot a gun at a target?”

  “No.”

  “You even held a gun?”

  “No. But I know how it’s done. It’s not rocket science.”

  He looked at me with his hard stare. “I can tell you one thing that’s as certain as sunrise. If you pull a gun on Weber, she’s going to take it away from you and blow your head off with it. I’ve seen men shot with their own guns. They die with the stupidest looks on their faces that you’ll ever see.”

  I had no rebuttal for that so I started my bike. While we were waiting for my engine to warm up, I said, “You going to buy grass from Warts?”

  “Why are you calling her Warts?” he asked.

  “Because she’s got warts.”

  “How do you know?” He laughed. “You see ‘em?”

  “Because she said so.”

  “That don’t mean it’s true,” he said.

  I was taken aback by that thought. “Why would she make up something disgusting like that?”

  “Keeps men from hassling her. Going after her like they would. Trying to get her alone. She’s in a bad line of work for a woman. Even a homely woman’s got to be on her guard.”

  “We weren’t hassling her. She was hassling us.”

  “Yup,” he said. “Effective, wasn’t it? I bet you haven’t had a lustful thought about her all week.”

  He was right about that.

  The trip to Syracuse seemed shorter this week than last. Time is perverse that way. It crawls toward what you want and speeds toward what you don’t.

  It seemed like my summer was speeding away. The only thing I had to look forward to, now, was going to university in September and that was frightening in its own way. High school had been easy enough, but Columbia University was no high school.

  We reached The Pioneer as lunch was ending. It didn’t look like they had a big rush like at Elsa’s. That was not surprising considering the quality of their food. And the quality of their cook.

  When Wanda saw me, she grinned. “You come back here to make me a happy woman, Gunner?”

  “If you’re happy that we’re going to buy your beer and talk, then sure,” I said.

  “I don’t need talk from a young pup like you to make me happy,” she said. “I need action to get satisfaction.”

  “I’m still engaged,” I said.

  “I still don’t care,” she said.

  “We’re here to do business,” Randal said. “We’ll each take a pint of whatever you got on tap.”

  “You get a pint,” she said. “This pup gets a soda. I’m not risking my license by serving a minor.”

  She hadn’t worried about that last time, but, last time, she had no reason to put me down. Now, I had turned her down and she was getting hers back. It didn’t matter that she didn’t actually want me.

  She returned with pint for Randal and a glass of bright pink cream soda for me. She charged the same price for both. And I don’t even like cream soda.

  Randal paid without comment. If I’d asked, he would have said that it was part of the cost of doing business with Wanda.

  The business turned out to be anticlimactic. Wanda asked us if drinks were all or if we wanted something to go. Randal said that twelve bucks should get us two to go, including the twenty percent tip. He laid a dozen hundred-dollar bills on the counter like he was paying a bar tab. She scooped them up and disappeared into the back room. She returned in a minute with a heavy paper bag that was folded and stapled closed.

  She didn’t count the money in front of anybody. We didn’t look in the bag. We trusted that we hadn’t been given hamburgers or bricks of oregano or ditch weed. She wouldn’t rip us off because we knew where to find her.

  I thought that Randal would try to pump her for more information about Billy. Try to find out if Warts had killed him for ripping her off. But he didn’t say a word. As soon as we had the stuff, we left. In retrospect, he was right. This trip wasn’t to find information, it was to build trust. If he’d pressed her again this week, like he had last week, he would have made her suspicious. And got no further.

  Neither bike had panniers so Randal strapped the bag to his sissy bar with bungee cords.

  Utica’s not far from Syracuse so the day was still young when we got to the liquor store. The sun was high and Gus’s shift wouldn’t start for a few hours. We had time to kill.

  I followed Randal up to a park in the middle of the city. The sign at the gate said that it was Roscoe Conkling Park. We could look out over the city from the top of a hill inside.

  We parked the bikes and carried the paper bag to a secluded spot near the top. After checking to make sure that there was nobody in sight, Randal pulled the staples out of the bag and opened it up. Two large freezer bags were packed with green weed. Randal pulled them open and smelled them. “Good stuff,” he said. “We don’t have a scale, but they feel like a couple of pounds each. I don’t think Weber shorted us. She’d be foolish to try that on our first buy and she’s no fool.”

  He repacked the bag and handed it to me. “You keep that safe,” he said. “I’m going to grab a little shut-eye.” He lay back on the grass and closed his eyes.

  I clutched the paper bag tight in my hands and stared at the view for a long time, thinking about being a drug dealer. This was not something that I had wanted to be doing this summer. If we got busted, Columbia would expel me before I set foot on campus. That didn’t fit my plan for the rest of my life.

  After a time, maybe half an hour, Randal’s soft snores turned to moaning.