by John O'Brien
“Wake up, Langston!” he shouted, startling Jill but eliciting no apparent response from the intended victim. They both stared at the sleeping man for a moment. “Lights,” he said to her. “Wait a second. Where’s the TV?”
“The busboy took it back to the kitchen early this morning. He’s watching it there.”
“Yeah, well he can bring it back up here and watch it with the rest of us.”
“I think he was only trying to be considerate of the ward.”
The ward. Funny, thought Rudd, it’s really funny. Sarcasm, yet she doesn’t seem to be a drinker. “A Latino kid carrying off a television set: probably the same scene that was on it when he unplugged it. Don’t trust him too far,” he whispered.
Jill was saved from having to respond to this by their arrival at the first panel of lights. She rattled them off: bar, booths, front, painting illumination. She pointed to another panel ten feet away near the corridor to the rest-rooms: back hall, those two tall lamps. He waited until she was through then used the full of his hand to slide all switches to their brightest positions, walked to the other panel and did the same. A chorus of groans arose from the room. Rudd ignored them.
“There’s more in the kitchen,” she told him, and they went straightaway.
Sure enough there was the busboy, leaning back on a chair with his feet up on a sink, watching the televised riot coverage while using a wooden cooking spoon to munch from an enormous can of beans.
Rudd felt the rage of his residual drunk seize him. “Hey, Paco!” he yelled, slapping the boy’s legs from the sink. “You speak English?” To Jill: “He speak English?”
“His name’s not Paco,” she said coldly.
The busboy set down his beans and rose to a standing position, aggressively taking a step toward Rudd.
“I don’t care what his fucking name is,” said Rudd as he opened his jacket to expose the Walther. All the time he watched the kid’s eyes, enjoying the reaction there but not finding it as satisfying as he had hoped. “Sit down,” he said. “We’ve got to go over the rules.”
“I can do rules,” he spit back, leaning against the sink, and Rudd, Jill, and most of all the busboy knew that he had won the round.
“Fine.” He took a position against a stove opposite the busboy. “Get me some more coffee, Jill.” Then looking at her: “Half coffee, half whiskey.” Back to the busboy: “My Hispanic brother and I need to have a chat.”
“You don’t even know what race I am,” said the kid derisively after Jill had left the room.
“Sure I do. Not white. Now let’s get down to business.”
The busboy listened though he could have guessed most of what he heard. First he was told that if he was planning to leave he should leave now. As Rudd was explaining the importance of him declaring his loyalties the busboy was thinking how mad he was at himself for losing his temper earlier, for falling out of character in front of this white man, now babbling about being able to provide protection. Food would be inventoried and rationed. More detailed plans regarding the food would be developed soon. The busboy was not to drink any of the liquor. The television stayed in the front room at all times. The woman brought the coffee in and handed it to the man. Rudd was in charge, but the busboy should be prepared to do whatever was asked of him because they were all in this together. Rudd and the other men would be happy to pay him for his time here if he chose to stay. At this he almost laughed as he had already hidden the lunch receipts in a safe place. Rudd babbled on. The busboy knew he couldn’t get back to his neighborhood now, not after the things he’d seen on the TV last night. The riot would end in a few days, and he’d be in much better shape if he were discovered by the National Guard in the company of these white men. Rudd was sorry about the Paco thing. When he finally got home he could always claim they’d made him stay. He’d have the bag from yesterday’s lunch plus whatever money these guys gave him to show his people about his loyalties. The man, Rudd, drained his coffee mug and said something about being glad they’d reached an understanding. The busboy thought they’d always had one.
By the time Rudd returned to the front room everyone was awake except Osmond and pretty much gathered at the back end of the bar, clustered near the coffee pots. Jill was a natural den mother, which was probably for the best, and Osmond’s steady snoring rang not so much in protest of the morning as refusal to be excluded from the conversation. Desultory gunfire pierced the morning outside as if so many lawnmower jockeys and leaf-blower-wielding immigrants had merely exchanged their noisemakers. The busboy came in carrying the television back to what would become its permanent location, and though Rudd hoped for the kid’s sake he wouldn’t be looking too sheepish in front of everybody, he was nonetheless angered when their eyes locked and the kid’s expression was one of utter detachment, if one were to give him the benefit of the doubt that is.
“So how do you like Tony’s?” said Rudd, sidling up to and putting his arm around Fenton. Clubstyle. Boys at Hollydale. … Maybe not here and now, he thought, dropping his arm.
Fenton smiled politely at the sarcasm. Rudd took the snub in stride, learning to be a good leader. People had homes, he supposed, other places to be, like Hollydale maybe. He looked around the room; he couldn’t think of any place he’d rather be.
“Thanks for the wake up, Rudd.” This from Langston, at Rudd’s left.
“Well, dammit, I’m sorry, but–”
The tall man turned on him, silencing him with a subtle facial tick that would have looked affected on anybody else, maybe just anybody without red hair. “No, I mean it. Here you are taking care of business while we’re all sawing wood. Won’t do, and I’m ashamed. Don’t normally sleep past eight.” He put his hand on Rudd’s arm. “I won’t again. You can count on me.”
Rudd caught himself short. About face. “I appreciate that, Langston,” he said simply and not without some dignity.
But Langston was looking at the television; they all were. The busboy had managed to turn it on and somehow vanish without Rudd noticing. Probably back to his can of beans, but big deal: beans is something we can spare.
“My God!” said Osmond, eyes glued on the screen as he staggered drunken from his booth like some retarded giant.
No one else could speak. What was on the screen looked more like a tiny Tokyo being trampled in a sixties Japanese monster movie than anything else in their experience. It was like a hallucination for these men: you know it’s not really there so you try to think your way around it. Only this was working in reverse: they knew it really was there yet they were unable to convince their senses that what they were seeing was real. The helicopter would record the undoing of twentieth-century America. Right now the skyline of the city—unclear exactly how live the shot was, but it was daylight-was aflame. Not a single high-rise bore no smoke or flame. Portions of some of the buildings were actually missing, presumably from internal explosions unless some National Guard artillery had been badly mishandled. There was no clear battle line, at least not from this shot, and how could there be; this was happening inside, from everywhere: blood oozing up through a submerged strainer. You’re the good guy. You’re the stainless-steel wire.
Moving in now, this intrepid news crew, for a closer look at some fallen comrades. Some panicky audio soon cut out as they approached the wreckage of NewsBird 9, shot down by some lucky small-arms fire on Sixth and Weldon, near the city’s unique downtown public pool, which for years now had been patronized almost exclusively by inner-city black kids, less for swimming than as a territorial prize. Still, a few more yards and NewsBird 9—you could read the logo, the helicopter on its side like a dead horse-could have made a water landing.
The camera pulled away fast; it was under fire, and the panicky audio cut back in. It was a mix of controlled professionalism and screaming and everything in between. Rudd was reminded of those cockpit tapes they sometimes release after a commercial jet goes down, unintelligible noises underscored on the nightly news by superimpose
d translations, as if the FAA was saying, This is what we hope they were saying. No underscores here, just the noises. Last shot was the copter pulling out, evidently unharmed, before the broadcast came back to an anchor seated at a desk. The morning commute’s not looking so good. Back to you, Bob.
Behind the anchor-a man more weary than startled-was a state map with little flame icons sprouting from two of the state’s three major cities. The anchor-his tie had been loosened and Rudd realized he had never seen this feature on an anchor before-spat out the names of these cities along with a few random statistics. Then a video effect caused the state map to be sucked into its smaller place in a national map, which now occupied the screen.
Brief exclamations popped about the room. It was important to acknowledge this stark, bicolored, line-drawn graphic, cogently more terrifying than the live video from moments before. Some fifteen or twenty little flame icons shadowed city dots across the map. Popcorn, thought Rudd, like their vocal reaction had been a sound track for this static image.
“There’s another one!” said Miles, pointing at the screen as if the existing little flame icons were absorbed, understood, and accepted and this new little flame icon was the real news. True though, there was another one, and the city not so darn big, a place in fact where one might justify one’s relocation by pointing out the indigenous security, the small-town atmosphere, the kids-walk-to-school-and-sometimes-we-even-forget-to-lock-the-door-at-nightness of the place.
Back to the anchor, the map zapped from full-screen but still looming over his shoulder, like it ain’t that easy. The man was listening intently to audio coming over his earpiece, had his hand up to it as the other hand received sheets of yellow paper torn hastily from what they call a legal pad and presumably carrying details of late-breaking events. The information age.
No commercials, thought Rudd.
I need a fucking drink, thought Langston, and he poured himself one.
My parents, thought Jill, apropos of the position of one of the little flame icons she saw on the screen.
“What are we going to do about him?” asked Fenton of Rudd without benefit of a gesture, the object of inquiry being fairly obvious.
Miles and Osmond pretended to be too absorbed in the TV to acknowledge and therefore participate in this, and perhaps they were. Langston was absorbed in his drink but otherwise willing to be of service.
Rudd half-heartedly looked around for the busboy before saying, “I guess you, me, and Langston can drag him into the freezer.”
“Sort of what I was thinking,” agreed Fenton.
Langston nodded, gulping. Such was McTeague.
Though Rudd would have preferred her to retire to the ladies’ room (or now lady’s room), Jill took a seat in one of the nearer booths and waited to wipe up the blood. As he moved behind the bar he caught a glimpse of the television. An intrepid reporter on the street talking with a local black religious figure; in the background the crowd, not missing their big chance to be on TV, hammed it up for the camera as though this was merely another drive-by shooting being covered. All those faces, smiling, some holding up the fruits of the morning’s looting, one guy with a Macintosh computer for chrissake, this is what Miles and Osmond couldn’t tear themselves away from, thought Rudd. He and Fenton exchanged a glance, and Langston came ‘round quickly to meet them.
Of the three thick net-like rubber mats behind the bar at Tony’s the bartender occupied most of the third one or the one nearest the front of the restaurant, deepest in the bar. If the other two were removed first it would make for an easier drag-magic carpet-but when Langston, instantly and silently apprehending the situation, turned around to clear the path he found himself anticipated, Miles and Osmond bearing away a mat apiece. Well then, he thought, good for Rudd; we’re all here.
Rudd and Fenton each grabbed a corner of the third mat; thus the body was dragged feet-first over the greasy tile. It was easy going, and Langston knew that he would amount to too many cooks so he stood by. Jill watched the whole thing. She didn’t blink, didn’t look away. She knew it would be better for her not to. She was in school. They all were, but she was the one who knew it first.
One nice thing about the rubber mat was that it protected the body from any unfortunate head bumps around corners. The trip to the freezer transpired without incident (insofar as it could, given the circumstances), and it wasn’t three minutes before the dead man was laid to rest in the far corner of the mercifully far-cornered freezer. Langston manned the door and watched Rudd and Fenton leave mat and all to kingdom come. The noises now were as follows: buzz from freezer lamp; outside gunfire; click of freezer-door latch as Langston let it slip; nothing from Rudd and Fenton; continuing coverage being watched by Miles and Osmond; plastic bottle being struck against plastic bucket as Jill searched the cleaning-supply closet for something to take up the already dried blood from the bartender’s chest (with a cursory look ahead to something gentle enough to serve as laundry soap). One block away a yellow traffic-signal box clicked, illuminating a WALK sign-as absurd as the trash basket over which it loomed beneath the sparkling sunny sky. This annoyed a man nearby, who fired six rounds from his 1911 clone forty-five at the box. He ran off; the box continued to operate; those shots changed nothing, and the sound of them, like a tree falling, went unacknowledged in Tony’s.
Langston, it would be recalled later in seemingly endless discussion of the incident, was either just closing or double-checking the latching of the freezer door when the fiercest barrage of gunfire they had experienced to date hammered the rear door. Rudd, Fenton, and Jill, all still in the kitchen with Langston (though not near him), instinctively sought cover, as did Miles and Osmond though they were back in front and in no immediate danger. Rudd was fairly certain that the door would hold up, and he was right; the few bullets that entered the room managed the trick via lucky landings on a previously weakened seam near a long-sealed hole originally intended as a night depository location of the S&L that Tony’s was originally intended to be. Sounded like two or three guys emptying as many clips, not unlike what they’d been hearing all through the night only closer, prompting Rudd to realize that what they had been hearing and by now pretty much ignoring was in each case probably a terrifying experience to someone somewhere. Little flame icons.
“Don’t worry,” he shouted to Jill, wrapped on the far side of a steel dishwasher and more or less out of harm’s way. “That door will take a lot.”
“Well it’s getting it,” she responded, rather pluckily, he thought, suddenly aroused either despite or because of the situation.
The pop of the aerosol can of Brite ‘n’ White cleaning solvent, which the busboy knew could cut through grease like nobody’s business, was a noise for Langston’s ears alone. And he didn’t scream, merely began rubbing his eyes and waiting for a lull in the shooting so that he might make his way to the sink and rinse them. He didn’t try to open them; he was a smarter man than that, and he tried to limit his rubbing to the surrounding area, that he might remove the excess fluid that began burning his skin as sort of an underscore to the unspeakable things it was doing to his eyes, open at the time of the small explosion and inches from the can.
“Jesus Christ!” said Rudd as he caught a glimpse of Langston’s face during the quick post-shooting inventory of his companions that was well on its way to becoming habitual. “Your face!” And he was upon him, leading him to the sink.
But no one knew yet the real damage, that Langston was blind, though the latter began to suspect it when he hit the sink and tried to open his eyes only to realize that they were already open. What Rudd was responding to was the accumulation of blood from the little cuts caused by can shrapnel which had peppered Langston’s face, nothing too bad or deep but looking that way due to being spread about by the latter’s hands. This became apparent under the cooling water, surprisingly efficacious in the relief it granted from the sting and burn. What also became apparent first to Rudd, then to Jill, who had to turn aw
ay from the sight, was the condition of Langston’s eyeballs.
“Do you think we could try for a hospital?” he asked.
A siren wailed in the distance, and for an absurd moment Rudd wondered who had called 911. “I don’t think you’d make the triage cut,” he answered.
“True enough,” said Langston, and Rudd marveled at the man.
Jill cried and went to fetch a bottle of scotch without being told to. Or even asked. Fetch.
Hours later as the afternoon burned beyond the security shutters the group was collected at the bar, all except for the busboy, who remained unnoticed in the kitchen and would have in any case been indignant at being considered one of the group. So would most of the group, for that matter. These hours had passed as if through a plenum, bearing with them a feeling of compression that permitted Langston’s blindness to become part of the group’s reality in far less time than any of them would have predicted. Even Langston accepted his condition readily, holding on only through some learned sense of commitment to his body, to the vaguest of hopes that his blindness might be temporary, his eyesight only an alcoholic blackout away.
On the benches near the windows at the front of Tony’s was where Langston lay. It would become a favorite place for him, those benches. He was fiddling with his gun, loading and unloading it from the new boxes of hollow points that he and Rudd had retrieved from his car late the previous night, learning about feeling things with his fingers and secretly enjoying this new limitation as if it represented a chance to play life again under a new set of rules.