Brawler

by Neil Connelly

  She looked down at me, more upset than angry. I was dwelling on the same thing I figured she was, the meaning behind a phrase like out of immediate danger for now.

  As she settled in next to me, another singer took the stage. I knew it was a touchy subject but figured a distraction was worth it, so I said, “Tell me about this jerk Wertzman.”

  “What now?” she asked.

  “Wertzman who thinks you can’t sing.”

  A frustrated grin cracked her stony expression. “Sterling Wertzman. He directs the plays at our school, thinks he’s God’s gift to the Harrisburg theater scene.”

  “You’re an actress?”

  “Last spring, I nailed my audition for Cinderella. I mean, objectively, I owned that song. It was mine.”

  “And what, this guy didn’t give you a part?”

  “Mouse #3,” Khajee said. “Not even a damn wicked stepsister. Cinderella went to Jenny Haskel, who can’t sing worth a damn but happens to be very tall, and very blonde, very beautiful in all the best ways — like all the leads. That’s just the way it is, right?”

  What Khajee had said back in the woods, when we were talking about Hollywood heroes, made more sense to me now. She went on. “This … friend of mine, she said we should quit in protest, so we did. Me and Mouse #2. Not that it made a difference — they found other mice and the world kept right on spinning. This year, I didn’t even bother trying out. Neither did she, and she can really dance.”

  “Their loss,” I said. “I meant what I said before. You’re a great singer.”

  “Everybody sounds good in the shower,” she said, stretching that grin. After a few seconds, she added, “But hey, thanks for saying it.”

  It was a weird moment, one that felt close but odd too, like back in the alley. Once again though, we were interrupted. A male nurse came striding up to us. “Can you follow me please?” he asked.

  Together, we stood, and I was surprised to find Khajee reach for my hand. He led us down a hallway and we took an elevator to the second floor, then down another hallway. Every step I was aware of her fingers in mine. With nothing but the unknown ahead, I was an anchor for her. It felt good to return the favor.

  Finally the nurse turned into a room and we saw Than resting in a bent bed, eyes closed, skin pale. A plastic mask connected to a green tank covered his mouth and nose. Khajee collapsed onto him, sobbing, and the male nurse said, “Dr. Ngoyo will be in as soon as he can.”

  I nodded and the nurse left us. Rain splattered the window. Beside Than, a clear bag of something hung, dripping liquid into a tube that curved down and into the crease of Than’s elbow. Khajee scraped a chair across the linoleum and sat at his side, holding his wrist. She whispered to him in Thai.

  The doctor, who was thin and brown-skinned, strode in a while later. He greeted us, checked on a monitor with green numbers, then turned to Khajee. She said, “What happened to my uncle?”

  “We’re dealing here with a bacteria called pneumococcus. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon in diabetics, though there is a vaccine. I suppose your uncle never had it.”

  I thought this was a cruddy thing to tell her. What was the point? The doctor went on. “This has led to pneumonia, something we’ll try to address with breathing treatments, and a condition called sepsis, basically a body-wide infection. We have antibiotics that will clear that up, hopefully.”

  “What do you mean ‘hopefully’? Will all this cure him or not?” Khajee shouted these questions, and the doctor looked at me for some sort of help. Khajee lowered her voice and asked, “Please. Is he going to die?”

  Dr. Ngoyo said, “I don’t decide that. But his condition is very serious. He’ll be admitted, of course. You could be looking at a prolonged stay.”

  “We have no insurance,” Khajee said, dropping her face.

  The doctor tried to hide his frown. “Legally we can’t discharge him, regardless of your ability to pay. But I’ll be honest with you, his care isn’t going to be inexpensive. Even if he recovers, his kidneys might be damaged. If they fail, which is likely, then we’ll be looking at dialysis.”

  A chime sounded in the doctor’s pocket and he pulled out a phone, glanced at the screen. Then he said, “When the time is right, someone can talk to you about payment plans, options for all that. For now, stay with him as long as you’d like.”

  He tucked the phone back in his pocket and left us. I moved behind Khajee with my hands on the back of her chair. For a while we said nothing. We listened to his ragged breathing and the hum of the machine at his side. The rain stopped. Now and then an announcement drifted in on the hospital PA. There was a Code Armstrong on the fourth floor. Khajee squeezed his hand. If Than noticed, I couldn’t tell.

  I leaned over and touched her right shoulder. “The money I have,” I told her, “it’s yours.”

  She bent that arm and patted my hand, then held my fingers. “That won’t be enough. I know what these places cost. Dialysis. Can you imagine? We have no credit cards, don’t own a damn thing worth selling. I’ll quit school I guess, try to find a steady second income.”

  I moved around to the side of her chair, still holding her hand, and bent a knee to the cold linoleum. Khajee’s face was streaked with tears. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I told her. “I can fix this.”

  She shook her head, looked at me like I was naïve and foolish. “We covered this, Mac. It’s not your job to save me. I don’t need you to be my hero.”

  I got to my feet. “I know that,” I said. “But I can be your friend.”

  So that’s how I ended up agreeing to do “side work” for Sunday. The same night Than took that ambulance ride, I got word to Sunday through Blalock and heard back quickly that he was happy I’d seen the light. I was told Grunt would call on me when my services were needed. Tuesday and Wednesday I waited, trying to prepare for Santana’s fight as best I could on my own. Each day I forced myself to stop by the hospital, pushing my anxieties down. The nurses let Khajee linger long past official visiting hours, keeping vigil by his side. She told me Than came around a couple times, sweaty and delirious, but he never showed any sign that he recognized her or knew where he was. According to Dr. Ngoyo, his condition hadn’t gotten worse, and we tried to see this as good news. “He’s too stubborn to die,” Khajee told me. She wasn’t happy when I explained that Sunday and I had reached an arrangement regarding the hospital bill, but she was too exhausted to really fight me about it.

  Late that Wednesday night, I left Khajee to let Rosie out, and when I got back to the apartment, eager for sleep, Grunt was standing on the front steps, jacket buttoned, arms crossed. We made eye contact and he nodded solemnly before walking without comment to a black van. On its side were the words, “Home Improvements, Renovations, Demolition. Free Estimates.”

  I let Rosie back inside, then followed and climbed into the passenger seat. Without saying a word, he drove off. After a few miles I asked, “So what’s the deal? Where are we going?” In response, Grunt reached one hand across my lap and popped open the glove box. Inside, I saw the gray metal of a gun.

  I reached for the weapon, and it felt cool in my palm. When I pulled it out, I was surprised at how light it was. During a middle school stint in Boy Scouts encouraged by one of my mom’s temporary boyfriends, I’d learned how to shoot a rifle. Part of the safety program involved pistols like this one. I popped out the magazine and saw that it was empty.

  “No bullets?” I asked.

  Grunt smirked and shook his head. This was no mistake. Maybe I wasn’t trusted yet, and they just wanted me to have a prop for whatever errand we were on. Or maybe they’d never think I was worthy. Regardless, I knew it was a slam on me, but I really didn’t care. In fact, I was relieved. I’d been awake the last two nights, bathroom door cracked pretty wide, thinking about the boxcar and my father’s genes, worried about what Sunday might ask me to do.

  Grunt drove us to a truck stop off Route 83, and we parked in the darkness beyond the gas pumps. Before
we got out, he showed me his gun, tucked down inside his beltline under his coat. I did the same and zipped up my jacket. He nodded and we headed inside. As we crossed the black asphalt, I said low, “So what’s up? What am I supposed to do?”

  He glanced back at me and said nothing.

  Inside we moved through the convenience store, where two old ladies held up the line bickering about which lottery tickets to buy, a gray-bearded trucker considered the hot dogs rotating beneath a plastic lid, and a father yelled at his kids to hurry up and pick out snacks because “all the jackholes I passed are passing us now.”

  Grunt led me down a long, thin hallway, past a refrigerator with a vault-like door. We had to step around a mop tilted into a yellow bucket on wheels. The water was gray and foul.

  At the end of the hallway was an office with the door open. When we walked in, a stubby man with a grease-stained white shirt rose up from behind a desk covered in papers. He and Grunt shook and he eyed me up, not extending a hand. “Mr. Sunday’s getting them kind of young these days, eh?”

  Grunt shrugged, and the man returned to his desk, pulled back a drawer, and withdrew an envelope. He gave it to Grunt, who passed it to me and rubbed his thumb into two fingers.

  “Come on,” the clerk said. “You can trust me.”

  I cleared a corner on the desk and laid out the twenties, counting as I went. I made three stacks of five and then announced, “Three hundred even.”

  Grunt reached out for the man’s shoulder and patted it, then turned. I collected the bills and fell into his wake. Behind us, the man said, “Okay, guys. Take care. Listen, you want some of those taquitos or a drink or something, it’s on the house. Anything at all. Just tell Lucy I said.”

  At the cooler, Grunt paused. He pulled out a Yoo-hoo, then looked at me. I shook my head, and he let the door close. As we brushed past the line at the checkout, Grunt twisted the top and guzzled the drink. I glanced over at the woman behind the register, frozen. Her eyes trailed Grunt. On her shirt, a worn name tag read, “Lucinda.” I wanted to say, I’m sorry, but I knew I had a part to play, and that didn’t involve apologies.

  After that first stop, we made a few more. There was a pool hall in Harrisburg, a VFW club in Enola, a steakhouse along the river, even a funeral parlor down in Mechanicsburg. Each place was about the same. Lots of nervous eyes and shaky hands, a kind of courtesy that felt false. Equally phony was the calm I projected as I stood behind Grunt with a steely gaze, a mask of pure badassery that covered my turning stomach.

  Between jobs, Grunt listened to AM radio. He never stayed on one station for more than a few minutes. One program had a conspiracy nut ranting about the government putting passivity chemicals in bottled water, then a call-in show where the host gave financial advice. We listened to a twangy country singer lament his lost love and then Grunt settled on a rock station. I recognized David Lee Roth’s voice belting out the chorus of “Running with the Devil” and I anticipated the upcoming lyrics about living life like there’s no tomorrow, but Grunt abruptly shifted to some preacher. Through the static of a distant station, he proclaimed, “None of us can fully know the love and grace of Jesus. But He tells us that salvation comes to those who seek Him. You need only walk the path of righteousness, and in that holy pursuit, you will find Christ!”

  Grunt snapped the station off, and we drove for a while listening only to the tires hum on the highway.

  Halfway to Carlisle, we pulled up to a warehouse as big as an airplane hangar. Inside we were greeted by a trio of muscle-headed goons. They looked like the type who’d played offensive line together in high school and were okay with that being their lives’ crowning achievement. Two crossed their arms like Grunt did, shoulders back, chin up. The third held a gun at his side. If Grunt noticed, he showed no concern. They brought us to a huge room with crates stacked thirty feet up. A woman drove a forklift past us, and we came upon a geeky-looking man, complete with pencil tucked behind one ear and clipboard. Like all of them, he acted happy to see Grunt, shaking his hand with a big grin. “So listen,” he began. “I’ve got a bit of a situation.”

  Flanked by his stony henchmen, the geek went on to tell a long story about a truck breaking down in Scranton, a supplier getting nervous about local cops, and his wife being sick with the flu. How they all connected to each other wasn’t entirely clear to me, but somehow his conclusion was that, as he put it, “I’m a little short this time. Tell Mr. Sunday I’ll make it up to him. He knows I cover my debts.”

  Along with his excuse, he offered Grunt an envelope. Emotionless, he passed it on to me and nodded. I counted what was inside and said, “Twenty-seven hundred.”

  Grunt’s eyebrows rose up a bit, and the man said, “You’ll tell Mr. Sunday my unusual circumstances, right? This is a once and done situation.”

  Grunt lifted a paw and dropped it hard on the guy’s shoulder, then gripped it till he winced. The bodyguards looked at each other, like they weren’t sure what to do, and I was right with them, uncertain of my role. Instinctively, I took half a step closer to the one with the gun. I unzipped my jacket, just enough to expose the handle of my own, a total bluff. I figured if he lifted his weapon, I might double-leg him, take him to the ground and see what happened next.

  But Grunt released his grip and grinned, and I breathed again. When we walked away, everything seemed copacetic. Only then, sitting behind the van’s steering wheel, Grunt took out his phone and texted somebody, I presumed Sunday. It was a long text, and I wondered if he was telling him how I was doing, and if so, what he thought of me. If I was handling myself or not.

  There was silence, followed by the ding of a new message. Grunt stared at the screen grim-faced, then tucked the phone back into his pocket. He didn’t start the van like I expected. Instead he climbed out and went around to the back. I met him in the rear as he opened the big back doors, and he bent into the dark interior, reaching with both hands. He straightened, holding a sledgehammer in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Extending his arms, he offered them to me, and I stared at my choice. “What are we going to do?” I asked, trying not to sound rattled.

  He pumped his hands and looked toward the warehouse, where I could see a second-story window with the light on. We were being watched and had to move quickly. I closed my fingers around the cool shaft of the crowbar and felt its flaky metal.

  Grunt left the rear doors open and strolled away from the van, along the other vehicles in the parking lot. We passed a souped-up Camaro with huge back wheels, a pickup truck, and a Jeep. Next to them, though, closest to the door and just beneath that lit window, was a hot little Miata. It was red, immaculately clean in the mix of moonlight and shine from the industrial lamps above the lot. With one hand, Grunt brought the sledge up and drove it down onto the center of the hood, crunching it like the lid of a cardboard box. Adjusting his grip to both hands, he eyed up the windshield but I beat him to it, shattering the glass with the curved tip of the crowbar. This sort of mayhem felt familiar, even comfortable. Bright jewels exploded into the air, like water cascading from a fountain. We moved along either side, taking out the windows and then the taillights, and it felt as if we’d rehearsed all this elegant devastation. Grunt and I acted in concert, mirror images of destruction.

  The warehouse door opened and we turned together. A figure was silhouetted by the light from inside, but whoever it was didn’t take a step in our direction. Grunt’s hand had slid inside his jacket. After a tense few moments, the door closed and we got back in our van, drove away.

  My blood was pumping from the thrill of what we’d done. I didn’t know if that dude deserved to have his car trashed and I didn’t care. His problem, not mine. There’s something about just unloading, letting it all rip, that nothing can compare to. That’s always been the satisfaction of wrestling for me. You don’t have to hold back. All the anger that nobody wants to see can come out, and suddenly you’re rewarded for channeling all the dark ugliness inside. There’s no rush like it. I wanted
to celebrate with Grunt, at least talk about what had happened, but he was as silent as ever.

  After the warehouse, I thought for sure we were finished, but it turned out we had two more stops. The first was in Dillsburg. We pulled into a strip mall that housed a barbershop, a bagel joint, and a place called “Battery Galaxy!!” that somehow stayed open. How many nine volts and double Ds do people need to buy?

  Grunt rolled past the empty anchor store, which had a big “Will Remodel for New Lease” banner across the front. He drove around back and parked by a huge loading door. Grunt turned the radio on. Some talk show had a former NASA specialist discussing the possibility of life on Mars. Grunt glanced starward and changed to some music.

  Sitting there with the radio on, I thought again of those rock ’n’ roll marathon drives with my mom, crisscrossing the network of Harrisburg highways when I was a boy. Looking back, I doubted some of those hazy recollections. Were there really nights she tossed a suitcase in the trunk? Did she really slow down at unfamiliar exits, activating the turn signal then racing on without taking the ramp? Maybe she was flirting with an escape from my dad. I can’t be sure. The mom of my memory was as unreadable to me in the back seat of that Subaru as Grunt was next to me in his van. Who knows what the heck was going on in the depths of his squared skull? Nothing seemed to bother him.

  Take for example the police cruiser that appeared at the other end of the alley behind that strip mall. It slowed as it neared us. We both had guns and Grunt had a bag stuffed with cash we couldn’t account for legally. But Grunt just stared at the cop over the dashboard as he parked fifteen feet away. “Let’s bolt!” I said under my breath. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Grunt didn’t move, so when the cop got out and strode in our direction, I opened my door, ready to make a break for it. But Grunt’s right hand latched down hard on my left thigh, locking me in place. He lowered his window, making it easy for the cop, who aimed a flashlight inside the van. It landed on me and stayed there for a few long breaths, long enough for me to assume he’d recognized my face from some APB. The ball of illumination swung to Grunt, and the cop said, “License and registration.”