by John O'Brien
Miles and Osmond glanced nervously at him, at Rudd, and at each other, watching the direction of the Beretta’s barrel as it moved between the hands of this blind man. Too embarrassed to say anything themselves, they hoped that Rudd might suggest to Langston that he put the gun down, but Rudd looked entirely unconcerned, lost in his own world, their world.
“Say there, Langston,” decided Miles after downing his drink for fortification, “where’d you get so much ammo?” He looked at Osmond, smiled broadly so everyone would know that this was purely conversational to pass the time of day and in no way was it anything at which offense should be taken.
Osmond smiled back, nodding eagerly so that Miles wanted to groan.
“My car,” said Langston. “Guess it’s yours now, Rudd.”
“The car?” said Osmond, and everybody wondered if he was being cute or did he really want to know; his face offered no clue.
“That too I suppose,” said Langston, characteristically trying to be pleasant and assuming the best. “But I was referring to these rounds. They’re nine-mm, and if I recall correctly Rudd’s Glock 19 is the only gun that takes this caliber, other than my Beretta that is.”
“And who gets that?” said Rudd, staring hard at Langston, hoping for a penetration of sorts.
“I keep that,” Langston told him, surprisingly meeting his eyes though this man saw nothing.
“Good,” said Rudd. “Then you’ll need the rounds. I have ammo in my car if I need it.”
“Well who doesn’t,” said Miles. “I do. I know he does,” indicating Osmond with his thumb. “What about you, Fenton?” Then, off the latter’s nod. “See. But a lot of good it does us in here, and I sure as hell am not going out there to get it. I can’t believe you guys went. Sort of reckless, don’t you think, endangering everybody like that? If I’d been awake I’d have stopped you.” He paused, uncomfortable with the sound of that and uncomfortable with the idea of toning it down. “Or at least tried.”
“We went out to close the security shutters-has to be done from the outside.” Rudd stood, but it turned out only to be so he could pour another drink. “Langston’s car was right there and he thought it would be a good idea to have some extra ammo. I agreed.” He sat back down. “Sorry if you’d rather not be left out of these things, Miles. Next time I’ll be sure to wake you.”
They fell silent, uncomfortable flirting with contention, knowing it wouldn’t help their situation. Jill felt like an observer and didn’t dare say a word. But she wanted to speak. She didn’t have anything to say really, just the need to speak, the need to get in now before it was too late, before she was shut out for the duration. Duration.
“It would be nice to have a little breathing room,” said Fenton, breaking the silence. “I only have two clips on me, one in the gun.”
They all agreed via nods and grunts.
“So go get it,” said Jill, and the pronouncement was, to say the least, galvanizing.
Fenton looked at Rudd. That’s when it happened, the exact moment when it became certain that they would attempt to recover all the ammo from their cars. Even Miles and Osmond knew they would be involved, and Osmond was frightened and Miles was ready. Inside he knew: he would grow readier by the hour, by the day too. Miles liked to shoot his gun. He did like that.
“What the fuck,” said Miles. He wanted to get a jump on the quorum, but he ended up startling Osmond more than impressing the others.
Rudd and Fenton were still on each other’s eyes. “We could do it,” said Fenton to his friend’s already nodding face. It was one of those slow nods geared to appear contemplative.
“I bet we could,” said Rudd to Fenton. “I bet we could,” said Rudd to the others.
“We’d want to go in the very early morning, that’s when things are likely to be quietest. Say right before the sun comes up.”
The men nodded, concurring with Fenton’s sound logic.
“Well my alarm’s on,” said Osmond for no apparent reason.
Miles turned to him with a quizzical squint. “Um, gee, Osmond, then I suppose your car will be pretty safe out there. I bet the looters are giving it a wide berth,” he said, hurting the man.
“I only meant that it’ll be hard to get into it quietly. It’ll chirp when I turn it off.”
“No,” said Langston from the bench. “Best set it off, break a window even. Nobody will notice that. We’ve been hearing car alarms all night-maybe our own for all we know. In any case the chirp of turning one off will almost certainly attract more hostile attention than if you sound like just another punk.”
Punk? thought Rudd. Sounded funny coming from Langston. Guess when you’re blind you can say anything. He said, “My Caddy’s parked in back. We could hit it no problem. You’re in front, right?” He wondered if Osmond was the only one here with an alarm, but then he knew Fenton had one. Maybe Rudd was the only one here without one. He decided to let it drop, hating the way that such a thing might be a status issue to a jerk like Miles.
Fenton nodded.
Rudd turned to Miles and Osmond. “How about you guys?”
“On the street, not far,” said Miles.
“Me too,” said Osmond. “But I’m on the other side. It’s a red Z, only four months old. They sell ‘em red, but mine’s custom lacquer. You’ll spot it right away. It’s real distinctive.”
Miles considered telling him to shut up but then thought better of it and had another drink instead. Rudd wondered why he was the only one who parked in back. He had always parked in back and assumed that all the regulars did, but now that he thought about it he realized that he’d never seen anybody but the valets back there. Could be that it was off-limits back there and Tony had given the word to let him slide as a valued customer. Could also be that the valets figured he wasn’t worth the bother.
“Langston’s is done, so we don’t have to worry about that. I say we go before dawn tomorrow morning,” said Rudd as if tossing it out for a vote.
“What do you drive, Langston?” Osmond wanted to know or at least wanted to know more than he wanted to agree to the proposal on the bar. After he said this he was proud of himself for talking so casually with a blind man, and he hoped the men had noticed and the woman too (he didn’t care about the busboy).
“Black Saab,” Langston told him. He was smelling a bullet and sounded distracted to Osmond, who considered the question more interesting than the smell of a bullet and was frantically searching his head to remember what cost more, the Nissan or the Saab. “900 Turbo convertible.”
Maybe the Saab, feared Osmond. “Nice family car, I guess,” he said. Smelling bullets. Gross.
“Well you’ll get to see it in a few hours,” said Rudd condescendingly.
Without being polled Miles said tersely, “I’m in.”
“Okay. Got a plan, Fenton?” Rudd was self-satisfied with how he’d coddled everyone into agreement, and now he wanted to keep his momentum by openly seeking Fenton’s counsel about the particulars.
Fenton thought for a moment before saying, “Only that we should do it all at once. I think it’s imperative to our security in here that the door be opened a minimum number of times, not only to minimize the risk of someone rushing it, but also to keep anybody from expecting it to open and setting up an ambush. The fewer times it’s opened the less chance of it being seen open.”
“I don’t follow,” said Miles.
“No, he’s right,” said Rudd.
“Absolutely,” echoed Langston, now touching his tongue to the same bullet he’d been smelling a few moments before, playing out the whole procedure as if he were trying to get a handle on how to ingest some inscrutable new drug, something beyond cocaine or Pepsi, the choice of a new generation.
“What we’ll do is all go to our own car at the same time,” said Rudd. “That will not only be less conspicuous than traveling in a group, but it will also minimize the time we spend outside.” Thinking he saw a nod of approval from her, he looked over to Jill
, but she was still, merely listening without comment.
“So nobody gets cover?” demanded Miles.
Fenton piped in with, “No. It’s not worth it. If we get into a cover situation we’re probably fucked anyhow–”
He was interrupted by a sudden and insistent banging on the outer security shutter. Muffled though it was through the various barriers, an urgent plea could also be distinguished, running under the percussion like a poorly played snare.
Everyone froze, not wanting to admit to themselves or to each other that not only was this somebody who needed help but that they were powerless to act. There would be no way to articulate this without sounding like a self-serving coward, and truth be told some of these men just wanted the sound to go away, perhaps wouldn’t help if they could. The first four eyes to meet were Rudd’s and Jill’s; he looked at her for a cue, a catalyst to induce a reaction in the glimmer of heroism he was experiencing, a feeling somewhere between the base of his penis and the back of his throat. When he looked up she was waiting for him, looking at him, and his cue came in the form of a single shake of her head. Slight-left, right-point of the nose: No.
He looked at Fenton. “Poor son of a bitch,” he said. Fenton.
“We don’t know that,” said Miles. “He could be bla-one of them.”
“Black or white, the guy needs help,” said Langston.
Then the shutter rattled briefly, struck by bullets, and there was no more pounding and there was no more screaming and there was no more discussion of the incident but for Miles’s observation that black or white he was dead now.
“But I guess we don’t know that either,” he added, “the poor son of a bitch.”
When they finished with that and the appropriate time had been spent doing that and thinking about that and regretting that and whatever else they felt might be required of themselves by one another it was decided that the foray to the vehicles for ammo would proceed and that Rudd and Fenton’s ideas on how to conduct it would prevail over Miles’s objections. For Rudd it was a seminal moment in his command (as he had come to think of it). For Fenton it was a noteworthy intercourse in his relationship with Rudd, and under a renewal of distant gunfire in the surrounding neighborhood he felt grateful that he’d never married. He was a single man, Fenton, and his life was wherever he put it.
Jill’s perspective was from behind the coffee machines at the back of the bar, but with the shutters closed the place was smaller and quieter, so it didn’t seem so far away from the men, who were fairly spread out anyway. In fact the room really did appear to have closed in slightly, compressed, she thought. Then she thought, This is a different issue, this is a piece of trouble that will not go away so I might as well deal with it later when I know more about what this all is. She was struck by the uniform appearance of the men. Each one sat behind a bottle clutching his glass like so many game show contestants standing by with hands on buzzers. Even the labels were all turned outward as if by design. It positively looked like some bizarre alky taste test or maybe a panel of debaters at a drunk convention. What was it with these guys? Somewhere, somehow she knew in her heart of hearts that, prevailing wisdom notwithstanding, money ought to buy at least a modicum of happiness. Yet these men, for all their bread, didn’t look very happy. At times there were glimmers of boys in the faces, not men acting like boys but rather men who had been boys. It was good for her to catch these moments, for they provided a path to compassion, and she began to wait for them, watch for them; in time she would come to live for them, those boys who flitted in and out of men’s faces.
The television hummed into the evening, and though no one watched or listened with any real commitment it is unlikely that any of them considered turning it off, any more than they would have considered turning off the clock on the wall, their watches, or the interruption-of-service recording one heard over the unavailing phone line. There were clicks on that line too. Jill was tired. She’d been standing in the same place for hours; the TV screen had become for her nothing more than an abstract light source, suggesting imaginary objects per the whim of her semi-consciousness, both sides now and pixilated clouds drifting over a nice girl like her and a place like this, a beta citizen in an alpha state. Hard not to think about the threat in a roomful of penises she simply doesn’t want anything to do with, so well-off white guys might at least provide a balance of power, which would keep her safe, but the looks will wax ever more lecherous and the thoughts will spark and linger time to lie down in a booth turn off the coffee maker that bra take a nap now and wash clothes tomorrow. She tried to focus on the television, searching for an update, a you-are-here arrow in the map of the apocalypse, but this simple grasp at information was beyond her for now. She focused on the booth, focused mentally. Then she walked over to it and lay down and then she was asleep.
Rudd, midway into a no-problem-yet drunk, watched surreptitiously her departure from the bar while pretending to ponder Langston’s position on the advisability of federally sponsored urban growth programs. This was solid old reliable drunk conversation, and everyone was indulging up to their eyeballs because it was familiar and relaxing; it came easy to them and it was what they would be doing right now even if there were no riot. A nice victory in a time like this, to be doing what you’d be doing anyway. Rudd liked looking at Jill and in fact had originally begun conversing with Langston because he assumed his wayward glances would go unnoticed. But it turned out that his verbal responses echoed quite accurately the degree of his attention, and he soon discovered that the conversation had to be conducted just like any other, with stolen glances and covert yawns. With Jill retired Rudd assembled a response to Langston’s droning. He was starting to care about having this conversation, Rudd was, feeling fire in his pontifications and growing impatient to advance his own theories. He knew this meant he was upping the stakes, moving from drunk to drunker, and he fucking loved it.
Halfway up the bar Fenton, Miles, and Osmond were engaged in their own conversation, the latter the drunkest of the lot if one were to split hairs, trying hard to keep up with the television as a way to briefly enter the conversation, to infuse it with new information, updates from the world at large like so many multicolored candy sprinkles falling on a ponderous dollop of whipped cream. Drinking made Osmond hungry, and he secretly suspected that when drunk he could eat with impunity. Sure, perhaps he’s taking in a few extra calories but certainly the alcohol must be blasting away all that lethal cholesterol from his arteries just as the Wet-Naps at Kentucky Fried Chicken so facilely remove the chicken grease from his fingers.
Fenton, sipping a J&B soda and predisposed to stick with it as what he drinks now that he drinks, nonetheless made a show of sampling, at Miles’s behest, small splashes of the various scotches carried at Tony’s. Miles pushed hard for Cutty Sark, this being his scotch, though at this moment he clutched a tall glass containing a Long Island Iced Tea hybrid padded with liqueurs and considered by its creator to be somewhat more expedient than Cutty Sark and somewhat less deserving of careful attention (though he gulped all his drinks with the same celerity). Fenton found himself taking to the copious refills pretty well. He amazed himself with his own tolerance, as if it had been latent inside of him, ready at any time to roll into his hand, ready for use with no period of nascency. And damn lucky too, that, because it didn’t look as though he’d be given much time to get himself up to speed with the other men. This is where he lived now-that much was clear-and he needed to be a part of it, needed to be here for Rudd, to find a good stool from which to view the apocalypse. J&B would be the call-that too was clear-no whiskey, no silly drunk man’s Cutty Sark or gooey liqueurs, just stand-up scotch and guns. Fenton found himself perturbed at the way Rudd had been sneaking glances at that waitress all evening, and even now as she slept he kept trying to get a look at her, though he would have to look straight through Fenton to see her. When their eyes met Fenton smiled and Rudd nodded, tacked on a small eye-roll as if he’d been trying to catch F
enton’s eye to provide this light commentary on how the discussion with Langston was going. Fenton saw through that, but he also appreciated the effort. He was drunk. He desperately wanted to be a priority.
“Look!” Osmond yelped, pointing at the television and knocking over his glass in the process. Glass breaks along rim. Vodka seeks fissures in slate-covered bar. Men are troubled by notion of lost liquor but don’t yet know why. Clip full of bullets purges into sky not forty feet from the back door. Goes unnoticed by all but busboy, who turns in his sleep, frightened and alone in the kitchen and bearing bad dreams.
No one looks at the television except for Langston, who can’t see it anyway, and of course Osmond, who was already looking and doesn’t appear interested in following up on his entreaty; or maybe he was merely thinking aloud.
“Now try the Cutty again,” enjoined Miles, indicating, even pushing gently forth an inch or two, a rocks glass that had come to be the basis for comparison in the lecture-as-delivered.
Fenton obliged, happy to be past the John Begg scotch that Miles had just given him. He began to suspect that Miles was stacking the deck, pouring the worst scotches right before the next control sip of Cutty and the better scotches as a preface to Fenton’s own glass of J&B, his basis for comparison in the lecture-as-received. “It’s better than that last stuff,” he opined, “but I still like the J&B.”
“What do you know from scotch?” demanded Miles rhetorically, much annoyed at this intransigence. He plucked the glass of Cutty from Fenton’s hand and downed it angrily. “You decide you want to be a scotch drinker and I invest all this time and effort in showing you what’s what and you don’t even want to listen!”
“I don’t see what you’re getting so upset about. It’s not like I asked you.”
“That’s not the point.” Miles paused, constructing the point in his head. “When a man reaches that stage in his life where he’s ready to call scotch his drink he ought to be able to discern a little quality. That’s the whole point of scotch! Otherwise he was never ready to begin with. Or he’s just faking.”