The After War

by Brandon Zenner

  But Darin was gone, so it was up to Nick and I to watch over our guests. Just last party I found a guy taking a line of coke in our bathroom. He was so strung out that he forgot to lock the handle, and when I told him to get rid of the shit or leave, he started spewing vulgarities at me through his clattering jaw. Before his erratic mind thought it was a good idea to throw a swing, Nick and I had his arms behind his back, and we did the old heave-ho out the door, holding the back of his belt and his collar. I learned long ago in my bartending days to never let the other guy swing first. Unless of course the other guy was so fucked up that he couldn’t hit the side of a wall. Or if the guy was a lawyer. Never hit a lawyer first. But back at my old bar, the local clientele were far from lawyers.

  Lucky for us, the crowd was mellow as the alcohol and marijuana flowed. At some point the fire chief showed up, wearing a big grin. He disappeared with Nick inside the house, and when he came back out, he was baked out of his mind.

  “Hey, Powers,” he said, his red eyes sparkling.

  “What’s up?”

  “Check this out.”

  The fire chief swung a canvas duffel bag around from his shoulder and opened the zipper. A copious amount of fireworks lay inside.

  “Cool, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I smiled. “Cool.”

  The night wore on and the fireworks were ignited to thunderous ovation from the enamored crowd. The fire chief kept his radio turned up in case the noise got called into the cops.

  Maybe fifteen people were gathered in the backyard when I saw headlights approach from down the driveway and stop short of the house. I checked the time on my watch. It was impossible to see in the darkness, but I knew the headlights belonged to the black Plymouth Fury Gran Coupe that had been arriving at our house at that same time every week, for years now. I looked for Nick in the crowd and spotted him by the fire.

  “Hey,” I said, approaching.

  When Nick looked at me, I tapped my watch and nodded toward the car. His face soured.

  “Motherfucker,” he muttered, and swilled back his beer.

  Nick went to the house, and a moment later he emerged from the front, walking toward the car. He opened the passenger door, illuminating the car’s interior while stepping inside.

  It wasn’t long until the passenger door opened again and Nick got out. The Plymouth reversed out of the driveway, not bothering to swing around the circle. Nick had told me in the past that the man didn’t like it when strangers were at our house during his stops. But then he had gone on, “If he makes his stops on a Friday, it can’t be avoided. Fuck him.”

  When Nick got close, I handed him a beer. His face was set in the same crazed anger that always overtook him after leaving the man in the Plymouth. I silently prayed that he wouldn’t start hitting the bottle hard, like he often did after the man’s visits, and go off on one of his insane rambles. Not now, not tonight. Tonight, I was celebrating my new life. My new path, as twisted as it might become.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  Nick took the beer and our eyes met. His face softened. “Yeah, man.” He patted me on the shoulder, and we walked into the yard to join the circle of people watching the fire chief light off the last of his fireworks.

  And there was Becka. Her fair complexion illuminated in bouncing shadows from the fire; her dark, somewhat curly hair pure black in the night.

  “Hey,” I said, walking up to her. “When’d you get here?”

  She turned and smiled at the sound of my voice. “Hey, Powers. Just a minute ago. I was looking for you.”

  She patted the grass beside her and I took a seat, making it a point for our thighs to touch.

  “I did it,” I told her. “I quit.”

  “The office?”

  “The office.”

  “Powers,” she exclaimed. “That’s wonderful, man!”

  She reached over and wrapped her arms around me, burying her face in my chest.

  This was good. This is what I needed. I needed Becka, her arms holding me tight all night long. When was the last time we’d hooked up? A week ago? Maybe more. Nick jokingly referred to Becka as my girlfriend, but we were nothing like that. Just friends. Two people in their mid-thirties who had been in terrible relationships, much like all the other loners out there who find themselves still single past their twenties. We just wanted to keep things cool. Sure, we liked each other, but we didn’t want to make our relationship something more than it needed to be. For her birthday last year I bought her a small oval locket. Nothing fancy or expensive. I regretted giving it to her the moment I saw the surprise and uncertainty on her face. She did wear it, though, up until recently. She said she misplaced it, put it down somewhere, and that it’s got to be around. Probably at home. Probably fell from the kitchen sink. She’d find it, she told me.

  But who knows.

  Becka had been friends with Nick for years longer than I’d known either of them. I once thought that Nick and Becka had a romantic past, but Darin later set me straight. Besides, their ages are decades apart … not like that would stop either of them.

  As the last explosion filled the air, the fire chief turned to the crowd. “That’s it,” he said, displaying his empty duffel bag. “That’s all she wrote.”

  Nick stood a few feet away from the crowd and we caught each other’s eyes.

  “Hey, Becka, you gonna be here for a few minutes?”

  She looked up at me with a smile and then turned to the fire. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I hugged her shoulder and stood. “Be right back.”

  “Hey, grab me a beer while you’re at it?” She displayed her near-empty bottle, the light from the fire making it transparent.

  “Of course.” I smiled, walking towards Nick. “Be right back.”

  Nick and I stood apart from the group as the fire chief shook out a few stray firecrackers into the fire, turning the duffel bag upside down and shaking it out.

  “Hey,” Nick shouted over the roar of our friends laughing and jumping away from this madman dumping explosives over the open flame. “I got something serious I want to talk to you about.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  “You give my proposition some thought?”

  I nodded, not that he could see me with his eyes transfixed on the fire. With Darin gone, Nick was shorthanded. He’d been asking me to work full time at his operation for years, but I always declined. I was too clean-cut for that life, I used to think. I was better off as a part time employee. But after spending three years stuck at a cubicle in the stalest environment that I could imagine, wasting away the best and most productive time of the day—between nine and five, when the human mind and body is at its best—I was starting to see things in a different light. Plus, he was offering me more than just hours—he was offering me a management position. Small responsibilities at first, but they would grow over time. But the real benefit, I thought, was that Becka and I would be spending more time together.

  “Yeah, Nick, I’ve given your proposition a lot of thought. I’m in. I’m all aboard.”

  He turned to me. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  He extended a hand, smiling like a little boy. “Oh, brother, you are most needed!”

  We shook, and then of course he hugged me.

  “Man, this is going to be great!” he shouted, arms out in the air, holding his beer aloft to the night sky. The light from the fire flickered dancing shadows all over his body.

  “We’ll start tomorrow,” he said, taking a swig of beer and bouncing on his toes.

  I smiled.

  He tossed the empty straight into the roaring flame, and grabbed two cold ones from the cooler. He popped the caps and handed me one.

  “Cheers, brother,” he said.

  We clinked glasses.

  “Cheers.”

  He took a long pull, and I again prayed to myself that he wouldn’t get too fucked up. I didn’t need him screaming crazy shit at our guests,
crying, sobbing, and talking nonsense.

  “I think it will be best if we start late,” he said after a burp.

  “Agreed.”

  Sipping my beer, I watched Becka transfixed on the fire, a smile on her radiant face as she swayed to the music. As much of a free spirit as she was, Becka had something about her. She had class, and an amazing mind that I wanted to keep discovering. She wasn’t the type of person to lay her cards out on the table; I had to keep guessing what was in her hand. Her beauty was the type that tongue-tied men, but there was more between us than sheer attraction. We had a chemistry that couldn’t be put into words, but only be felt as a throbbing heat in my chest. It was intrigue that kept me coming back for more; it was her quiet, pondering eyes that displayed indecipherable emotion. Simple words from her lips carried the weight of the world and affected me like I imagine poetry inspires minds greater than my own.

  Her shadowy form beckoned me to approach and sit with her on that lush field of grass for as long as eternity would allow.

  Turning, I grabbed two beers from the cooler. I was about to tell Nick that I would be back, but he had seen the rapture in my eyes and had begun to drift away, chatting with the fire chief.

  “Welcome back,” Becka said, looking up to me as I approached. There was longing in her stare.

  Feeling a bit drunk, I smiled coolly and took a seat beside her to watch the roaring flames.

  Tomorrow, my life would change—for the better, I thought. I would be managing a productive and quite illegal drug operation. But now, in the present moment, I didn’t want to contemplate the future or lament the past. I wanted to stay stuck in time, right where I was.

  Chapter 2

  My head was spinning. The last time I looked at the clock it said 2:00 AM and Becka was giving me a goodbye kiss. Now, 10:45 AM blazed from the clock. I desperately wanted to sleep the day away, but there were two things that were driving me out of the bed:

  1. I had to pee, bad.

  2. I needed the largest and coldest glass of water that was possible.

  Nick’s room was on the way to the bathroom, and his door was cracked open. The bright sun shone through the American flag that he used as a curtain along with the dozen or so blue glass bottles that lined his windowsill, casting the room in varying shades of red and blue. Those colors in the morning had a strange effect on me that I wasn’t sure if I liked. They were somehow both agitating and soothing.

  After my morning pee that seemed to never end, I stuck my head into Nick’s room, expecting to see him passed out on top of his blankets, still wearing his cutoff shorts.

  But he wasn’t there.

  As I walked into the kitchen the back door flew open, and in came Nick bouncing on his toes, holding a tall glass of something red with a green sprout sticking out.

  “Hey, Powers, you’re up!”

  He was wide wake, apparently.

  I rubbed my eyes. “When’d you get up?”

  He shrugged. “About an hour ago.”

  The kitchen smelled of coffee, which was most welcoming. I poured myself a tall glass of water and a mug full of hot, black coffee and sat at the table.

  “This is what you need, man, if you want to fly right.” Nick opened the refrigerator.

  “A bloody Mary?” I was going to dismiss the idea of drinking anything alcoholic, but I had to admit, it sounded appealing.

  Nick made a drink and put it on the table before me. He then went to the cabinet to remove two aspirin from the container, along with either a Ritalin or Adderall left over from a party, placing them all next to my drink. Then he went to the stove to scramble some eggs.

  “You’re in a good mood,” I said, looking down at my variety of drinks and pills.

  “Damn straight.” He cracked eggs into a bowl.

  Watching him at the stove, a flashback from last night passed through my memory: I saw Nick get in one of his dreaded drunken moods, crying while crawling across the grass in inebriated delirium. It was around the time everyone left and my memory was becoming fuzzy. He was shouting the same fragmented statements, things he only ever brought up at the tail end of a serious bender. But he always cut himself short of explaining what he was rambling about. He spoke as if battling some demon inside him, so all I would get is “It’s—they … they’s took me, man—it was them. I only, didn’t want to do it, man,” and he would be crying. “I-I was a just a k-kid, man, those fucking-fucks, they-they took me, man!” Whatever he was talking about, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know. Occasionally, he would shout the same jumbled utterances while sleeping. I was warned a long time ago to never wake him up if I heard screaming in the middle of the night. So I never did. Darin had known Nick way longer than I had, so he was able to wake him out of those episodes without getting himself killed.

  Nick put a plate of eggs before me along with a bottle of hot sauce.

  “Eat up,” he said. “Then go take a shower. We’re leaving in half an hour.”

  I nodded. I had made an agreement, but I’d been half expecting Nick to be just as hung over as myself. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.

  ***

  We took Nick’s van to the highway, and then drove south for about twenty minutes. He was taking me to two locations, both of which I was already familiar with. The first was his office, since I was now expected to help keep tabs on the books. The building itself was tiny, an old one-car garage, the sliding door patched up with drywall and converted into a single office room with a bathroom in the back. A battered wooden sign read “Grady Construction and Repair” over the front door.

  It was a mess.

  Papers everywhere, filing cabinets overflowing with files, and Nick’s blue glass jars and bottles bordering every spare inch around the room’s two windows. On top of the cabinets was an assortment of rocks and crystals.

  Nick read the expression on my face. “Don’t worry about all this.” His hands danced over the room. “We can clean up however you like. This,” he said, pointing to the corner of the room, “is where we keep the important stuff.” He grabbed the sides of a filing cabinet and slid it aside. Then he knelt down, feeling the edge of a strip of molding. He pulled, and the baseboard came free of the magnets keeping it in place. Nick put the molding aside, and reached into a cavity to remove several large ledgers, placing them each on the desk in turn.

  “These are the books,” he said. “Expense reports. Payroll. A section of the wall pops free too, with the safe behind it.”

  “How are the books standing?” The random slips of papers jutting out from the pages answered my question. A few even fell out and drifted to the floor.

  “Well,” Nick said, scratching the side of his face, “not as bad as they look, but I’m close to falling behind. I’m juggling too much at the moment.”

  I nodded.

  “All right then.” I started rolling up my sleeves. “Should we start?”

  “Not yet.” Nick shook his head. “We’re going to the warehouse first. With Darin gone, I’m shorthanded at the operation. I want to show you a few things. That’s where you’ll be needed the most.”

  We had negotiated a salary on the way to the office, and had settled on a fair rate—more than fair. About twice of what cubicle-hell was paying me. I would do whatever was needed. There was no way I was going to fuck this up; it wasn’t like I could bounce around from job to job forever. This was it.

  Nick put the ledgers back in the hole in the wall, replaced the molding, and moved the cabinet in place. The little shiny rocks jittered on top.

  Then he turned to the door, and I followed him out.

  We drove to another part of town, closer to the shore. The area was industrial, with large warehouses belonging to FedEx, UPS, as well as about a dozen or so smaller companies. Nick drove across a vast and vacant paved lot, and parked around the corner of a windowless rectangular building, all steel and metal. The wall approaching had a large faded mural of graffiti, which must have been vibrant, perhaps even nice when it wa
s first spray-painted by whatever talented kids vandalized it. The graffiti had been painted over with a nearly transparent coating of white paint, but the colors showed through. This was the first time I was seeing it this early in the day, and the rainbow, cartoonish mural of a girl’s face along with some zigzag signatures were legible.

  Nick parked next to a white sedan with several moving vans nearby. A dark blue Mercedes Benz sat a few spots down. The car was a little beat up, but still looked sharp.

  My part time work for Nick had always been late at night when the other workers were long gone. It was Nick’s design that not all of his employees should meet and know each other. A good business model when you’re in his type of work. The only people I ever worked with in those long dark hours were Becka and a security guard named Jeff. But that guy didn’t talk much, just drank coffee and watched old movies on his portable television. That’s how I got to know Becka: at the warehouse. She’d been working for Nick … I don’t know, maybe seven years longer than myself? Maybe more.

  Nick got out, and I followed him to a side door. Earlier, he had given me his master code. I still had my own code, but along with my promotion came the responsibility of increased knowledge. Only myself, Nick, and one other employee had the master code. Nick entered it on a keypad and a little LED flashed from red to green. Inside, a large man stood up from a folding chair holding a crumpled crossword puzzle and a pencil.

  “Nick,” the man said, nodding.“Mark, brother, meet Powers.”

  The day shift guard named Mark reached out and shook my hand. He stood a foot taller than the both of us, and his palm looked like an elephant stump coming out of his black leather jacket.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  “Same.”

  “That your Benz out there?”

  He nodded.

  “Nice car.”