The Assault on Tony's

by John O'Brien

  “This is stupid,” said Fenton, knowing it was. “Besides, Langston doesn’t drink that Cutty shit,” he added, too drunk to stop himself.

  “Langston’s a spoiled rich kid grown up. And now he’s blind.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “He’s used to having what he wants, not what he should have.”

  Fenton tried this on in an effort to reveal it. “So I should drink a scotch I don’t like because it’s better for me?”

  “Better in a quality sense. Start now when it’s all new to you, and you’ll develop a taste for it. Don’t you see? This is a perfect opportunity for you to learn to like a quality scotch. I mean, you’ve got to start from scratch anyway, so why not develop yourself into a real scotch drinker? Believe me, you’ll thank me in years to come. Just ask Osmond.”

  But this last suggestion was forgotten as quickly as it was spoken, and not because Osmond didn’t even drink scotch, a detail that didn’t occur to either man. They fell to silence and brooded over their respective glasses, both ready to move along to new business. Fenton realized that Langston had fallen asleep, lay supine on the bench. Rudd appeared either lost in thought or half asleep himself. Osmond was glassy-eyed over his newly poured martini, locked onto the television screen.

  “Oh fuck. I don’t know. Guess it’s you if it’s you and me if it’s me,” Miles deduced rather nonsensically. “We agree to disagree,” he clarified, extending his hand.

  Fenton took the proffered palm, and they shook hands protractedly and with genuine (if ephemeral) affection. “At least we won’t be stepping on each other’s toes when the well starts to run dry,” he said.

  And that shut them both up in a hell of a hurry.

  Day3

  The first thing Osmond saw when he opened his eyes was the television screen. Tape he’d seen last night but he was frightened nonetheless, and he jumped-more of a convulsion-so hard that he knocked the table of the booth he was sleeping in and sent a glass rolling off the side. It shattered and Rudd snapped to and the two men looked at each other.

  “I fell asleep,” said Rudd, checking his watch. He settled back slightly. “Good, it’s only four-thirty. We’ll still have time.”

  Fuck, thought Osmond. “I’m so fucking hung over. I was only getting up for another drink. You go back to sleep,” he tried.

  Rudd said nothing but did swing his legs onto the floor and began to yawn and stretch the sleep from his system.

  “I guess I fell asleep too,” said Osmond, standing to fetch a swallow of vodka. “Came over here to watch some TV, but not so close. You know?”

  Rudd nodded, the easy way out.

  “Right. So like that,” sputtered Osmond, very, very nervous and making no sense.

  Drunk, scared, thought Rudd.

  Fenton had been right; it was quiet at this hour, as if the riots had settled into a schedule, dropped the pace and sought their own level, oozed like Osmond’s vodka into the crevices, keeping a skim over the flat regions but leaving room for the high points of not-riot to peak through. Okay for now, but this was in fact a sign of a long haul.

  “Your friend was right,” said Osmond to Rudd. “I don’t hear any shooting. Maybe it’s all blowing over.” He sipped his newly poured vodka, drained it, and felt some hope. “Maybe we should call this off and wait. We could make sure, because if it’s gonna be over we don’t want to risk our necks for nothing. Right?”

  Osmond poured more vodka for himself. This annoyed Rudd more than the man’s whining, though he couldn’t yet say why. Keep it easy.

  Silently Rudd walked over to where Fenton was slumped in a booth. He stopped short, as if remembering something, and turned back to the bar where Osmond stood. “I hope so, Osmond. That would be great, and I hope you’re right. But I think we’ll go just the same. Just in case. That way we’ll be prepared.” He patted Osmond on the back affectionately while grabbing the bottle of vodka with his other hand. “Need to borrow this for a second,” he said.

  Behind the bar he found the plastic bottle of tomato juice, but it smelled a little too organic and he poured it out. Under the bar were the large cans from which these bottles were filled, oversized cans with scaled-up labels that made them look like props from Land of the Giants, a television show from his childhood, a show that aired during the same years Rudd would find such cans in the family refrigerator. V8, those were, his father preferring that brand to the blander Campbell’s Tomato Juice which Rudd now held in his larger-than-his-father’s-was hand. He’d read somewhere that they were going to make a Land of the Giants movie, this when it seemed all they ever made anymore were movies based on terrible old television shows, the worse the better, like some guy hearing a joke wrong but laughing and repeating it anyway rather than appearing to have not gotten it. Those movie people thought bad equaled camp. Big cans of juice had given way to glass, then plastic, then glass again, because in the world of recycling some things were more equal than others, a lesson those movie people would do well to learn. We’d reached the evolutionary peak of packaging too quickly, faster anyhow than developments in parallel technologies would allow us to proceed. Or perhaps we wised up and caught a glimpse of the ennui implicit in that kind of dead end, extrapolated a Characteristic straight through a Downside and arrived at a Problem that allowed us to back down with honor. Such was the view from the peak, from the top of a big plastic bottle of V8, from the glory days of styrofoam when the hot side stayed hot and the cool side stayed cool. A Land of the Giants movie. … Rudd tasted copper in his mouth. He really couldn’t say, as he glanced at the coverage of the apocalypse on the television screen, whether he’d rather be watching that or this right now.

  Rudd poured a stiff bloody mary as Osmond looked on and wondered why it had to be from the vodka bottle he’d been drinking from and not one of the zillion others behind the bar. Rudd downed the drink and poured another one, which he carried past Osmond (not bothering to return the pilfered vodka, Osmond noticed but didn’t mention) back to the booth where Fenton slept.

  “Hey,” he nudged.

  Fenton half opened his eyes and groaned. “Oh God,” he said.

  “Drink this quick,” Rudd told him. “I did this once in college.”

  “Drink this.”

  “Swore I’d never do it again.”

  “No bullshit. Just drink it.”

  “I almost made it.”

  “You didn’t even come close. Now are you going to drink this or are you going to spend the day moaning and puking?”

  Fenton sat up and took the glass. “Both, would be my guess,” he said.

  Rudd watched approvingly as his friend downed the drink as quickly as possible. He figured Fenton wouldn’t need too much instruction, not because he was experienced but because he’d watched Rudd do this many times at Hollydale. Fenton handed him the empty glass, and Rudd went to refill it.

  “Shouldn’t I be relatively sober, that is if we’re still planning to go out to the cars this morning?”

  “Oh we’re going all right,” said Rudd from the bar. “Just as soon as you get sober, which should be right after this drink.”

  “I’m not you, Rudd. It doesn’t work that way with me, not yet anyway.”

  “It does when you’re hung over. Better drunk than sick.” He stopped what he was doing and announced loudly to the room, “Let’s go men! C’mon, wake up! It’ll be light soon and we can’t have that.”

  Rudd smiled at the grimacing Fenton, who said, “Jesus, Rudd.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Rudd, still smiling and bearing the fresh drink. “Stick with me and hangovers will be a thing of the past.”

  “Fuck you, Rudd,” squawked Miles from his booth.

  “You too, Miles. Now get up.”

  Osmond, still at the bar, debated whether or not to make a drink for Miles. But it seemed different somehow, and he knew from experience that whenever he tried to do stuff like that it usually went badly. Jill sat up, looked aroun
d, and hurried off to the restroom. Langston hadn’t moved, but Rudd saw that his eyes were open so he must be awake; then he wasn’t so sure. Is Langston dead? And even if he’s not, do blind people close their eyes at night?

  “Langston, you awake?” Rudd said crisply, one vertebrate to another.

  “Well my eyes are open, aren’t they?”

  “Just asking. I’ve got better things to do than gaze into your eyes, Langston,” said Rudd, adding a chuckle so that everyone would take it right. Then he thought, God, I hope he wasn’t really asking me.

  Osmond said (and anyone could tell he was already loaded), “Yeah, they’re open, but we thought you might be dead.”

  At this everyone laughed, which annoyed Rudd to no end. The busboy stood in the kitchen making himself a three-egg omelet, the smell of which reached Fenton, nauseating him. In the restroom Jill devised a sort of lock for the door by using a chair braced under the decorative brushed stainless-steel handle. She took off her shirt and approached the mirror with the idea of inspecting a pimple she had been tracking on her back, but like a slap in the face it occurred to her that she should have Langston’s gun. It should have been offered to her, offered right away. That was all she thought about while she looked in the mirror, getting angrier and angrier. She stayed there for quite some time. If Rudd could have seen her, standing there in her bra, he most certainly would have had an erection.

  In the kitchen, nothing left of the busboy’s breakfast but the residual grease and odor, Rudd corralled the men near the back door. But it was Langston (getting a bit too comfortable, Rudd thought, with the privilege of blindness, which was quite frankly beginning to wear a little thin, and the others, Rudd was sure, would agree) who led things off with his calm intonation, insidiously insistent in its very lack of presumption, from the rear of the group.

  “Just go,” he said. “At this point the less thought put into this the better. I’ll wait by the door, and if I hear trouble I’ll fire some shots into the air as cover. You hear that, come running back. If you can.”

  Rudd then felt things generally turn to him, so he nodded before unbolting the door and pushing out. This was yes. Outside the night was still as fucking graffiti.

  Miles was fourth out, and he turned control of the door over to Langston, who could and would go either way. Again Rudd nodded, and they dispersed. Rudd reached his Cadillac first, for his was the nearest car, parked behind the restaurant and not fifty feet from the door. He regretted this, wished that his had been the longest and riskiest of the four runs because it would have allowed him to push the issue harder than he had. As it was he had pretty much let Fenton and Langston have the show, but at least it was better than having Miles accuse him of having glass balls, something that jerk would no doubt come up with. It was so quiet that he felt silly running, until it occurred to him that if someone were out here waiting for the back door to open then Rudd would be the first target. There were plenty of ideal sniper locations with a great view of this lot; he hoped the others appreciated that.

  His Caddy looked pretty good, at least from this side. A brick rested on the hood, having evidently bounced on and dented a few places, but no windows were broken—small miracle—and Rudd realized that he’d need to pull out his keys and unlock the door to get in. Annoying, this, because he always approached his car with his keys in hand. It pissed him off that he should neglect this simple idiosyncrasy at the very moment it would be most appropriate. Of course he could afford any alarm he wanted; he just didn’t want one. Carry around a fucking remote control in your pocket all day. They didn’t have those things when this car was built. Show a little style. Chirp chirp! Fucking pompous faggots. He put the key into the driver’s door lock and almost opened it before remembering how it always makes a rusty squeal. So far so good, but best use the passenger side. Nimbly he passed around the rear of the car, opened the door, and felt the cool invitation of his Cadillac’s interior.

  The other men, having started their runs more or less in a group due to the relative proximity of their cars, broke swiftly apart as they turned from the rear parking area into the alley that ran alongside Tony’s to the street. Things took on an every-man-for-himself feel, a thought better left to the deep dark realm of retrospective solitude. Of these men Miles made his car first, a white Mercedes parked not far from the outlet of the alley and on the same side of the street. It had been hit hard and looked it, what with most of the windows broken and the passenger door standing open. Miles’s first reaction was anger that his alarm had not sounded, but he wouldn’t have noticed it if it had so he really didn’t know. One of so many alarms, he spent a moment in vain trying to parse the almost constant dialog of alarms that had underscored these many hours, trying to isolate which had been his and what he’d been doing right then. His stereo was missing. He felt violated, same as he did all the other times his stereo had been stolen, once in this very neighborhood, and he wondered if that would be a problem with the insurance. There was a small explosion in the east and the sky lit up briefly, a trailer for the sun, a coming attraction. Miles gasped; though he could hear other men at their cars, or at least knew they were there, he felt very alone. His face caught a chill, glistening in the crisp night air.

  Fenton’s Lexus, half a block down on the same side of the street, looked okay except for a small object resting on top of the car. As he drew closer (circumspectly, caution being prescribed when dealing with an unforeseen circumstance such as this) he also noticed the rear passenger-side vent window had been shattered, like some street thug thought it was business as usual and went in the professional way. Guy was probably in and out in something like fifteen seconds, disappeared down an alley with Fenton’s Alpine under his arm, dodging the more opportunistic looters. Close up Fenton was able to identify what rested on his roof. It was—absurdly-a half-eaten hot dog sitting in a small pleated-paper tray, so neatly that it seemed to have been carefully placed there. Perhaps the roof of his car had served as spectator seating for whatever had been going on out here. Inside, he noticed, his alarm indicator light was pulsing at twice its normal rate, a signal to its owner that it had gone off for ninety seconds before rearming itself. Fenton, whose condo sat above a parking garage that seemed perpetually to ring with ignored car alarms, especially at five in the morning, had insisted on this feature when purchasing the unit. He was not a man to fuck with the peace, and he paused after instinctively reaching for his remote. His fingers played over the car keys, the little plastic box to which they were attached like little pocket convicts. He remembered the earlier conversation: Langston would have him set it off. Good advice. It all made perfect sense. Years with car alarms and he was the only person he knew who hadn’t accidentally set off his own alarm at one time or another. Fenton was proud of that record. One little chirp. His fingers caressed the remote. You have your logic and you have your gut, he thought. But for a small explosion in the east things were quiet. He stood there in the night, reached out and lightly touched the hot dog with the tip of his index finger.

  Z. Far side of the street, and even with all this bad shit going down (one might say if one were black), Osmond felt the same tingle of pride he always felt when approaching his car. Red. Or even just catching sight of it. He surveyed the surrounding cars and it didn’t look good; almost every car had been fucked with in some way, and despite his already labored breathing Osmond quickened his trot and his belly filled with anxiety. He was scared to be out here and he hoped he wouldn’t piss himself or worse. An explosion in the east didn’t help that situation at all. Z looked okay as he approached it, but that would be too much to hope for. Z’s other side must be fucked. He ran up to the car and circled it completely, barely slowing. And fuck if it wasn’t totally untouched. That fucking alarm really paid off, he thought, and a smile overtook his face as he gazed at Z’s interior, his reflection on the placid glass. The red armed-indicator light of his alarm dinked and poppled on the tip of his reflected nose, almost tickled, hee-hee.
So you can’t have everything you want, fuckers, thought Osmond as he pulled his keys from his pocket. He hit the little green disarm button on his remote, and the single chirp of his alarm rang out through the quiet streets and alleys that crissed and crossed about the smoldering neighborhood. Now that’s a reassuring sound.

  One hundred yards away (as the drunk weaves) two men sat with their backs resting against a Dumpster. Between them lay a third man, prone and with a cheap steak knife rising and falling between his shoulder blades with the diminishing breathy gags of expiration. Other wounds peppered this man, wounds from the same knife and bullet wounds too, the latter having brought him down and the former being inflicted as mostly sport and to settle the argument about what kind of noise a knife makes when inserted into human flesh. His attackers were so occupied sorting cash and credit cards, bickering like kids over Halloween candy, that they didn’t even notice when the breathing stopped. In any case the show was getting old for them, and since neither could believe that this free-for-all would last forever they had developed something of a let’s-move-on consensus. One was working hard on selling the other on a you-take-the-cards-and-I’ll-take-the-cash arrangement, and amazingly enough he felt he was getting close, there being one born every minute, when the chirp of a car alarm seized their common attention.

  “What the fuck,” said Cash, almost smiling.

  Cards’s hand fell to his waistband, to the white plastic grip of his forty-five. He was just plain glad to be there.

  It was lucky that Langston had that extra nine-mm ammo because the only thing Rudd had in the Caddy right now was three boxes of 380 rounds for his Walther. They were in the glove compartment, where he also normally kept extra nine-mm as well but had used them (loaned them, actually) during an impromptu stop at the firing range the week before. Promise of a quick replacement from Maxwell, the acquaintance at the range who had borrowed them, prevented Rudd from buying more. Lesson learned. He dropped into the passenger side and opened the glove compartment. The 380 rounds were still there; he knew they would be. All was quiet except for that small explosion in the east, and that was nothing. Everything was going fine. He rose from the car, heard the chirp of an alarm. Paused.