Grayson's Knife

by Russell H Aborn

  “Like Hugh says the pharm kids will tell the cops who shot the kid, anyhow. So, get rid of it. I don’t know where. Just get rid of it.”

  Donny says, “Anyway, you hang tough. We need you to be alert at all times. No booze. Okay? You all right?”

  “Far from it.”

  Donny says, “One, it was an accident, two, what if he was going to shoot you, your brother, or worst of all, me? So, fuck Bird, he was a loose cannon. Don’t lose sleep over him.”

  “Easy to say,” Grayson says. “I don’t get how doing something you think is right can make you feel so bad. I guess because someone died?”

  “All that, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ stuff they drilled in us as kids, man. It’s hard to shake, even when you need to. And we really need to now.”

  “I know.” It was then it occurred to Grayson that Donny meant that in a different way than Grayson did. “What do you mean?”

  “Them Lard Dorks are going to be mightily pissed off. We may have to take it to them.”

  Grayson is shocked. Then he laughs. “You know, with all the other shit going on, I forgot all about them. They could come after us, too.” He puts his face in his hands and laughs too hard and too long.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Grayson calls Charlie’s apartment, and he picked up.

  Grayson says, “Did you see the paper?”

  “I did see it in the paper,” Charlie says. “It’s not as bad as I expected. I expected cops with bullhorns and floodlights outside by now.”

  “Donny says the guy was in critical condition. That sounds bad to me.”

  “As long as he doesn’t die, I’m happy,” Charlie says.

  “How’d you get so mellow?” Grayson asks.

  “Librium,” Charlie says.

  “Donny’s here. Come over.” He hangs up at Charlie’s assent.

  Donny stands in the kitchen, listening to Grayson’s end of the discussion.

  “Speaking of mellow, I went by Deet’s house,” Donny says. “I purchased something for anxiety. The greenies make it tough to sleep, and with the thinking we need to do, I need my rest, so I smoothed myself out. You want a couple?”

  Grayson shakes his head. “Deet’s wife hasn’t finished him off yet?”

  “No, she split, like a couple of months ago. Took her shotgun, the dog and the pickup, went home to Alabama. I never told you that?”

  “No.”

  “I still call him Deet, but he has himself a new nickname. Skeet.”

  Roger Dietrich, or Deet, had been nuzzling his girlfriend on the couch in her second-floor apartment when he heard his wife call his name from outside. He peeked out to see her heading for the entry door with a shotgun in her hand. He opened the window and climbed out. He hung on to the sill, and was working up the courage to let go and drop to the ground when his wife stepped back out of the street entrance. She’d faked him out. She took aim, and when Deet let go of the sill, she blasted him in mid-air, riddling his butt with buckshot. As a result, Deet became Skeet.

  “He’s been behaving himself since then, too,” Donny says. “Losing a big chunk of his ass made him self-conscious around the ladies. He can’t even sit right anymore. Always tilted.”

  Donny stretches out on the floor and is quiet. Grayson is on the couch tossing a tennis ball in the air and catching it, repeatedly.

  Sometime after 9PM, the downstairs hall door slams and a heavy, slow tread hit the stairs and came up. Grayson tenses, until he realizes it is only one man coming up. If it had been the cops, they’d have come in force.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  “Hey, open up,” Charlie says.

  “It’s open,” Donny says.

  Inside, Charlie says, “You aren’t going to believe this,”

  His voice is so fraught with tension, it sounds as if he’s being strangled.

  “If it’s bad I will,” Grayson says.

  “I listened to the news on the radio,” Charlie says. “You hear it?”

  Donny stands up and rubs his face.

  “No,” Grayson says. “What did it say?”

  “The guy that Bird shot?” Charlie says.

  “He didn’t die? Don’t tell me that,” Donny says.

  “No. He’s a state cop. An undercover state cop.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Charlie’s recap of the grim news is followed by much groaning and gnashing of teeth. When he starts relaying what exactly he’d heard on the radio, Charlie’s legs begin shaking so much that he orders Grayson off the couch. Charlie feels his way around the coffee table to the couch, drops on it and mimes the image of forlorn; flat on his back, eyes closed, a forearm across his forehead.

  “It’s worse saying it out loud.” His throat and mouth are so dry he’s having a hard time getting his words out. “The State Police detectives, no doubt, already grilled those kids. You know they told them about the guys who set them up, the cops have talked to Judith, who told the cops about us. We’ll have cops on us like stink on a monkey.”

  “Slow down,” Donny says. “We’re not in jail yet.”

  “Yeah! Yeah!” Charlie says. He sits up, his face red. “I’m getting out of town. No question. Bikers and the state police are hunting me down.”

  Donny says, “We need to be cool. Now’s not the right time to panic.”

  “Make sure you let me know when it is time to panic,” Charlie says. “I have to get my hands on some money.”

  Donny put his hands up in a ‘Halt’ position. “Let’s take a break from talking for a few minutes, take deep breaths and see if that calms us down. Ready?”

  “Cut the shit,” Charlie says.

  “I’m serious,” Donny says, and looks at Grayson. “You got any Coke?”

  “No. You’re not going to hit the coke, are you?” Grayson says.

  “Not that, the drinking kind.” He heads into the kitchen.

  Meanwhile, Charlie says, “I’m gonna barf.”

  “You know where the bathroom is. Go,” Grayson says. Charlie trots down the hall and slams the bathroom door shut.

  Donny comes back in the room with a tumbler of water, pulls a few capsules from his shirt pocket and throws them in his mouth and swallows the water.

  Donny looks down the hall to get a position fix on Charlie. Then he comes over to loom above Grayson.

  Donny says, “Shooting a cop is real bad trouble, man. We may have to do some damage control.”

  “Like what?”

  “We may have to get rough with some people, like you did with Bird.”

  “That was---”

  “Self-defense. I’m agreeing with you. This is also self-defense. Sure, sometimes I overreact. When I feel threatened, I’m often unable to control my impulses. That’s what that school shrink told my mother.”

  Their high school gym teacher, Mr. Aaron Fuller, was, like many gym teachers, a bully. He had pegged a basketball at Donny, hitting him square on the face, and Donny, at fifteen and not yet full sized, responded by jamming the thirty-year-old teacher into a locker. Mr. Fuller was a large, muscular man, and he did not fit in the locker readily, but Donny, diligent when properly motivated, got him in eventually.

  Grayson says, “Give me a chance to try and think before you wig out and make things worse.”

  Donny pulls the shade away from the window and peeks out.

  Grayson says, “Under no circumstances are you to harm anyone.”

  Donny turns. “You were the one that did the harm. You and Bird.”

  “Promise.”

  “We need the scoop on the cop Bird shot,” Donny says.

  “The news says critical,” Charlie says, standing in the doorway. “That’s the scoop. Critical.”

  “Okay,” Grayson says. “Critical means alive. Let’s not fall apart yet.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Charlie and Donny leave and about two minutes later Hugh is on the phone.

  “Amy wants to talk to us,” Hugh says. “Here. Now.”

&nb
sp; “Five minutes,” Grayson says.

  He gets to Hugh’s and together they walk down the carpeted hall and knock on Amy’s door. She pulls open the door, looking like a thirteen-year old boy’s fantasy, standing there wearing a tight white sweater, a short leather skirt and a stern look.

  Inside, she says, “Stan Belzer is beside himself. Bird is dead. What happened?”

  “An accident,” Hugh says. “He fell out the window.”

  “He fell? How? Was he stoned?”

  “I bumped into him,” Grayson says. “I didn’t mean for him to go out the window.”

  “Listen,” she says. She looks from face to face. “We’re going to have to do better than that. I’ve got to tell Stan something. Or he could kill all of us.”

  “He might have been stoned,” Grayson says. “Does he have a history we weren’t told about? We’re the ones should be pissed off. Sending that loon to work with us. He shot a guy who turned out to be a cop.”

  “He must have had a reason. Did he say why?”

  “He was an idiot, that’s why,” Grayson says.

  She says, “There has to be an explanation. Bird may have realized the man was a state cop. Maybe he recognized him… maybe he’d once been arrested by the man.”

  “Bird said the guy was reaching for the bag,” Hugh says. “Bird thought there might have been a gun inside the bag. He panicked and shot him.”

  Grayson says “And he was ready to shoot him again.”

  “Oh?” she says. “Is that when he fell out the window?” She makes those annoying fucking finger quotes in the air again.

  “Right around then,” Grayson says.

  “Well,” she says. “We better figure out what we’re going to tell Stan.”

  They go back and forth a few times and come up with a simple story in pretty short order. Hugh stands in front of them, recapping it.

  “My brother and Charlie were in the hall, so they didn’t see anything. Donny and I were behind the couch scooping the cash. We heard a commotion and stood up just in time to see Bird tussling with one of the kids. The kid shoved Bird, and as he was falling out, the kid started to run away, but despite being off balance, Bird managed to get a shot off as he struggled not to fall, but then, poor old Bird fell right out the window.”

  “He might buy it,” Amy says. “I know it’s bullshit but maybe I can sell it.”

  “Once again, we better hope the people we’re dealing with are idiots,” Grayson says.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  He blasts away from Hugh’s apartment, and wants to drink so bad he almost starts crying. He can’t think of a good reason why he shouldn’t drink, but how is that possible? He didn’t want to see or talk to anyone, so he went up past Quincy Square. He didn’t want to be around anyone because they’d look right through him, see he was empty. He finds himself on the perimeter of Quincy Square, and heads south down Route 3A toward Hull and Nantasket Beach. On Washington St, there seems to be a bar every hundred yards. This is not the best street to be on for a guy who didn’t want to drink.

  “Oh hey,” Grayson says aloud, alone in the car. “What the fuck? Why would I quit now? What is the fucking point?”

  He wheels into a lot beside a dumpy joint just down the street from the Fore River Bridge. He feels relief just by walking through the front door. At the bar, his flesh tingles, he is breathing faster and he feels alive.

  The bar maid, whose face is blurred and body has no definable form, just stands there and says nothing. She doesn’t register as human, not because of her, but because Grayson’s mind races. She is just a means to an end, there to deliver the goods, and he does not have to be charming in this hell hole.

  “Double Seven with ice and a bottle of Miller.”

  It didn’t take long, it took forever, a good fifteen seconds, to get the rye poured, the bottle cap snapped off, and his order set down in front of him. She seems to know a man starting a siege when she sees one, so she doen’t press him for payment. If she runs a tab for him, there might be an opportunity to fleece him as the evening wears on.

  He raises the Seven to his mouth, blocks the ice with his teeth and feels the cold whiskey flow, leaving in its wake a stream of warmth and light. He set down the glass, picks up the bottle of beer, drinks, and as the alcohol hits his blood, the world is left behind. Peace.

  The bar maid forms up in front of him, and sets him up again without asking.

  The first round brings light, and the second round takes it away. But, if he could stop now, if he could just stop, and go home, and be happy to be numb for just a little while. He could never predict the outcome once he started. There were times when four shots and two beers would render him legless, and other times when it works like he hoped it would, but always it took a while to find out which state was operative.

  By and by he began to lose track of the fact…that…he was…something.

  And when he reappears in his own life he is standing on the corner of Harrison Ave and Beach Street in Chinatown, pointed in the direction of the Combat Zone. He often finds himself, without knowing he’d been lost, popping in and out of the action like some time traveler on a sci-fi program, asking himself, who am I, how did I get here, and where am I going? He’d never gotten used to these blackouts but had no idea what to do about it. Now he lurched along the sidewalk for half a block before concluding he is without destination. Whatever mad plan had brought him here had stealthily deserted him somewhere along the line; it had washed away before he surfaced from the inky pool to find himself bathed in headlights and neon. Conventional wisdom is that guys went to the Combat Zone to get laid, but Grayson knew almost no one got laid in the Zone, and, if they did, it was never for free. They did drink while they hung out, and this is what makes it easy to get into a fight. Frustrated, boozed up, un-laid guys were irritable as hell. This is the real reason it is called The Combat Zone.

  At the corner of Beach and Knapp he looked left, down the short street which ran to Kneeland, and the White Castle on the corner. While a hamburger would not help, it could not hurt, so he made his way down Knapp. Guys are rolling in and out of some bar a little way down. He tries to visualize a plumb line in front of him, and to walk along it, but he grows increasingly angry as he fails badly.

  In a dark landing on his left a door flies open on an explosion of jocular noise, and surfing on a wave of merriment, five good sized young guys, sporting identical blue windbreakers came roistering out to the sidewalk, and knock into Grayson as if he were invisible. The collision provides Grayson a close up look at the UNH wildcat logo and the crossed hockey sticks below it. These guys are enjoying their Spring Break in the squalor of The Zone. The boys regroup, still without seeing him and start toward Beach Street.

  “Hey!” Grayson says. “Say excuse me.”

  The boys stop talking and turned in various poses and look back at him. He sees that each of the five are as big or bigger than he was. Good.

  At first, they appear to wonder if he is talking to them. Then one snorts and says, “Fuck you,” drawing it out and saying it in exactly the wrong way. They turn and resume walking, hooting at each other as if they and only they were all that there was.

  Rage reanimates like nothing else; silent, Grayson runs at them and leaps at their backs like Killer Kowalski. The three in the middle hit the asphalt like they’d fallen off a roof. Unfortunately, that still left two standing, and before Grayson can get to his feet, the two left up-right are raining down punches, spicing things up with a kick here and there. By the time Grayson struggles to a standing crouch, all five boys are taking shots at him and have gotten a nice rhythm going.

  “One, two, cha cha cha,” Grayson says.

  In between the thumping noises, he hears a motorcycle approaching.

  “All right! Knock it off,” a voice hollers.

  The punching ceases just before the ink pool floods in.

  How long was he in the ink before the blinding white light appears? Who knows? But app
ear it did, and then it went out.

  And when the light appears again, he hears a voice as if it came from behind the light.

  “He’s responsive,” the voice says.

  “That’s great, doc,” another voice says. “You wouldn’t believe all the fuckin’ forms I’d have to fill out if he died.” He pronounces the word forms as, “foe-ums.”

  Grayson opens his eyes to see a droopy, florid face looking down at him from under a blue Boston Police cap. There is no accent as strong as a Boston cop’s accent. He closes his eyes again, but not before the cop sees him.

  “Good morning, you silly son of a bitch.”

  “He reeks of alcohol and his blood test shows he’s intoxicated. Shouldn’t you book him?” the first voice says.

  “Not a bit of it. Shouldn’t you observe him for several more hours?”

  “I’d rather not keep him here. He may be agitated,” the first voice says.

  “Hey, look,” the cop says. “I’ve had my fill of the agitated for tonight. My whole workday is awash with the agitated. The agitated, the criminal and the insane.”

  “I’m awake,” Grayson says.

  He looks to the other side and sees a small, sparkling clean fellow in medical scrubs. He is brainy-looking, fitted out with horned rim glasses and a preppy haircut.

  “I’d rather you arrested him,” the doctor says.

  “We can’t arrest him,” the cop says. “As most of these frolicsome lads already know, we can no longer arrest for public drunkenness. It’s strictly catch and release.”

  “I was beaten up,” Grayson says.

  “Like hell you were,” the cop says. “I interviewed several credible eyewitnesses, college athletes in fact, who reported that you, drunk as a lord, took a bad spill and tumbled into a car bumper and then fell to the sidewalk, where you proceeded to pass out. If there’s more to the story, I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Sit up,” the doctor says. “Can you?”

  Grayson sits up. The doctor shines the pen light in his face again, then runs the usual tests for a concussion.

  “I’ll okay your release if you can get someone to keep an eye on you. Is there anyone you can call?”