The Shooting

by James Boice

  Her vise grip tightened. The more he ignored her the greater the pressure she put on him, the more she pushed him. She kicked the sheets off herself with more hostility. Muttered a little louder. He rolled over onto his back. Looked up at the ceiling. He could not stand it anymore. He said, —What, goddammit, what do you have to say to me?

  Before she could uncork, the front door opened. Then it closed again. And at once the home was warm with the presence of Clayton. They listened to him walk past their room, go into the bathroom, and close the door, turn on the water. They heard him pee. She was no longer tense. She lay still. He still heard her breathing heavily but it was not her huffing and puffing—she was asleep. He put his hand on her back and kissed her. She was very hot and damp. Buried his face in her hair and fell asleep with her, it came so easily now, all the worry dispelled like it had been nothing.

  Knocking on the front door. He wakes. Sits up.

  —Who’s that? she says, rousing beside him.

  —I don’t know.

  It is hard, rapid knocking. Banging.

  —Don’t answer it, she says.

  He gets up, leaves the bedroom, goes to the door. The deadbolt is not turned. It is always turned at night. Clayton’s bedroom light is off but his door is open, and he feels a vacancy in the bedroom and knows Clayton is not in bed. It’s happened again, he thinks. His sleepwalking was very disturbing. It represented deep psychological trauma, in-born wounds that break the handyman’s heart. The boy was conceived in horror and now lives his life in it. Through the door now, between the pounding knocks, a voice is yelling something. He opens the door. It’s Lucien, the doorman. Clayton is not with him.

  —Where is he? the handyman says.

  Lucien says, —There’s been a shooting.

  He knows. He runs to the elevator, and when that does not come quickly enough he takes the stairs, two at a time, all the way to the top floor where he runs into the police with their guns out. They put their guns into his face.

  —GET DOWN! GET THE FUCK DOWN! SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!

  He does, they cuff him. He is coated in sweat. Past them, as they lift him to his feet by his arms, he can see through Fisher’s door into his apartment and he can see a basketball sneaker and he can see blood.

  —CLAYTON! he is screaming. —CLAYTON!

  He is struggling to break free from the cops. His son. They wrestle him down the stairs. He fights them every step. They will have to break all his bones. All he can do is scream his son’s name. It explodes off the stairwell walls. Then he is again in the basement, cuffed and escorted down through the basement hall to the rear exit of the building, and she is standing there, outside their apartment. He cannot tell her. But he does not need to—somehow she already knows. —No, no, no, she is saying. He feels the officer’s grip on his right arm loosen and twists away, or tries to, to run back to the stairs and up to Clayton.

  —Stop resisting! this cop squeals, a twenty-two-year-old white man.

  —No! he says.

  Something wet on his face and orange on the wall and then his face is burning, like the cop’s fingers are shoved into his eyeballs, a fork stabbed deep into his tongue. He is set on fire. His fight is taken from him. They drag his burning limp body out the door. He is slobbering. He does not care about the pain. He could take more of it than this. Do they think this is all he can take? Outside he cannot see but hears voices and sirens.

  —Let him go, that’s his father! people are shouting.

  Lucien’s voice is saying to the cops, —He had nothing to do with it, it’s his son!

  —Stay here, bro, the cop shouts at him. He does. Water is poured over his head. The fire is extinguished. Hands are touching him, trying to pull him away. His friends, his neighbors. Protecting him. —Why are you fighting me, bro? the cop voice says.

  He does not care about the pain and he does not care about cops. The cops could nail his hands to a wooden cross and hoist it up and stab him in the ribs, and he still would not care about the cops.

  —Clayton! he is screaming, throat still thick and raw from the fire.

  —There he is! someone cries.

  He thinks they mean Clayton. —Clayton! he says. He is blinking his eyes, can open them now, but everything is very blurry. Out the same rear door they brought him through they now bring Clayton. Thank God!

  But it is not Clayton. It is a white wad of a human, a fat short chunk. The devil. Here is the devil. Here is the monster of the world, it is the monster of tonight, here are those monsters from that night and all nights. He opens the doors for monsters knocking at night and in rushes hell. The cops could not inflict real pain but now the real pain comes. He roars. The real pain begins at his feet—no, it starts in the dirt beneath the concrete he stands on, then rises through it into his feet, up calves to thighs, through groin, rips up into bowel and stomach unleashing shit and poison into his blood and then it keeps going, snaps his ribs one by one, slaughters his heart. It slaughters it. He collapses into the arms of his friends roaring in his handcuffs, even the cop now letting go of him as Fisher is shoved past into a police car and taken away. The handyman’s wife then runs out the door and no one stops her as she chases the cruiser.

  —Go, he says, —run.

  She runs in silence, robe flapping behind her. He hopes she runs faster than anyone ever has and never stops running so it never gets her. He hopes she runs faster than hell.

  But it gets her. No way it will not. It gets her at the hospital. At the hospital they expect to sit with their son while he recovers from the shooting. But you do not recover from a shooting. They tell them this, at the hospital. You do not recover. Not from this one. And that is when it gets her. It gets her worse than it got him. She turns to him and takes his head in her hands like she could bash it, and in her eyes is pleading, desperation. Fix this, her eyes says. You fix things, so fix this. He can do nothing. All he can do is catch her when she loses consciousness. It is her only recourse in the face of hell, when it gets her. He helps them put her into a bed.

  —Keep her this way, he tells them. —Give her what she needs to stay like this.

  Everyone is very nice. He feels guilty that they are so nice. They give him water, tell him what to do. Ask him what they can do. He does not know what they can do, but they tell him what he must do now is talk to the police.

  He talks to the police. Tells the police everything he knows, which is very little, and the police in return tell him nothing they know, which is very much. Their questions are designed to figure out what Clayton did to deserve this. Did he get into fights, have trouble with anybody? Did he run with gangs? Did he have any sudden, unexplained income? What kinds of drugs did he do? How often did he go to school? Did you ever know him to carry a gun? They keep asking about a gun: He had a gun, right? Where’d he get it? Come on, what kind of gun? You never saw a gun? You’ll be in big trouble if you knew your kid had a gun and didn’t do anything about it. This is your one chance. He is to answer these questions, he is to take these insane questions seriously. He is to tell them everything they want to know, and he does, but they are to answer none of his questions, they are to tell him nothing he wants to know. Realizes in the middle of the conversation with the police that he is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but they are not his and he does not know whose they are and has no recollection of ever getting dressed. Whose clothes are these? Where did they come from?

  And then the police allow him to stop answering their questions and he is told what he must do now is identify the body. The body. Someone from the hospital brings him into a room where there is someone on a table completely covered by a sheet. He focuses on this someone from the hospital instead of the someone under the sheet. She is a young woman, not much older than Clayton. She asks if he would like water. He has water. Can’t she see it? It is in his hands. Can’t she see? She asks if there’s anything she can do. How is he supposed to know? He is not her boss, he is not a doctor anymore—how is he supposed to know enough
to tell her what to do? He hates being with someone who is only pretending to be somber, only approximating the display of pain. She is a barnacle. None of this means enough to her. It is insulting to think he would not see through such bad acting. She is quiet with her hands folded in front of her and speaks gently. —Mr. Kabede, is this your son? And she pulls back the sheet. How dare she pull it back? She does not know how his bedroom smells or what he likes to eat or about his stuffed turtle, which you had to make sure was in his crib with him or he would cry. She has never seen him cry. She has never loved him. How he hates this person, with fervor, without end.

  —Sir? Is this your son?

  He can barely spit out that it is. She has tissues. Of course she does. Hands him one. He throws it off to the side and it drifts down like a feather to the floor. Silent now, she puts the sheet back over Clayton. He grabs her dainty wrist, stops her.

  —Is this what we went through it all for? he asks her in his language.

  She does not understand. She is nervous—he is squeezing harder than he means. She yanks her wrist away and hurries toward the door and opens it. —Our grief liaison, Michael Kapper, she says, —will be more than happy to go over the many resources we offer, if you would like to wait for him in our waiting room.

  He ignores her. He pulls the sheet back again.

  —Sir, she says, not knowing how to handle this.

  He touches his son’s face. Blood in his hair they missed when they cleaned him. His last bath. He remembers bathing him as a baby. Eyes wide open, mouth grimacing in terror. Small hole through his cheek. Lips pulled back. Teeth shattered. He remembers when those teeth came in. Clayton was so proud of them. Now they will soon be dust. He kisses his son. His son, Clayton. His baby, who will soon be dust. Feels her about to speak, to try to get him out of the room away from Clayton. —I stay, he says before she can speak.

  —I’m so sorry, sir, but we do have a policy, we—

  He says to her, —I stay.

  She leaves, returns with security and a man in a suit. —He won’t leave, he hears her whisper to them.

  —Okay, okay, the man in the suit whispers back to her. Then the door closes again and does not open, and he stays there all night, undisturbed, with the body of his son.

  A knock on the door. He sits up in bed, puts his feet on the floor. His wife beside him in bed says, —Who is it? Who is knocking at this time of night? He is standing up, saying, —I don’t know. He is leaving the bedroom, she is saying, —Why are you going to answer it if you do not know who it is?

  He walks across the living room to the front door. The banging is very insistent, urgent.

  —Hello? calls a voice he does not recognize. —Doctor?

  Maybe someone is ill or injured. He pulls aside the curtain to peek out the window. It is someone he does not recognize, a short foreign man. The accent he speaks in is very heavy and strange. Looking out beyond the man, all he sees is darkness.

  —Yes? he asks the man, through the window. —Yes? Are you sick?

  The man does not answer. He looks very nervous. —Yes, he finally says. —I am sick.

  The doctor steps away from the window, makes sure the door is locked, then returns to the bedroom. —It’s nothing, he tells her. —Kids playing around.

  —Are you sure? she says.

  —Yes. Something should be done about them. They’re hooligans. Where are their parents?

  —It is them, isn’t it?

  —No.

  —Isn’t it?

  —I don’t know.

  —What will we do?

  —Just wait. They will go away.

  The knocking stops.

  —See? he says. —Now let’s go back to sleep.

  He lies down on his side, his back to her. She lies down on her back, facing up. He sleeps, she does not. In the morning he makes contact with an organization that helps people at risk of death at the hands of the regime, which demands religious extremity and are known to behead in public those who represent Western culture, which is unholy and evil, even those caught practicing Western medicine. Somehow to them he has become the symbol representing Western medicine. The organization says there is little they can do, the regime has won control of all borders and travel in and out is near impossible, but they are working to find him and his wife passage out. They wait. Neighbor tries to give him a gun, a thirty-year-old Soviet AK-47.

  —I can’t take it, the doctor says, —these are very hard to come by, you will need it yourself, you already have very little.

  —That is true, says the neighbor, —just a small home and a cow and a bicycle and my family, but they are not coming for me, only for you, you must take it. I saw them last night. I do not know where they are from but not from here. See?

  The neighbor points at the dirt where there are seemingly hundreds of boot prints.

  —These are in front of no one else’s house, Doctor. Please. Take the gun.

  He does. That night they come again.

  —Don’t answer it, she says.

  He does not. They shatter the window and are climbing in through it. She is screaming. He has the gun. How does it work? He goes to the doorway of the bedroom and points it and holds the trigger down, it comes to life, squirms and jolts in his arms like a small pig. In the flashes it makes in the dark he can see their faces, their bodies hunching and falling and running away and dying. He fires until it does not fire anymore. When he stops his home is filled with smoke and the smell of eggs, and his hearing is muffled and his ears hurt. Bodies lie all over. They are kids—eighteen, nineteen years old. Outside through the shattered window he can see one more running away into the night. Then he sees his neighbor run out of his house and chase him and tackle him and wrestle him to the dirt and bash him in the head with a rock. Goes to his wife who is under the bed and screaming. As he is attending to her one of them appears in the bedroom doorway. He is very small and very young, maybe twelve or thirteen. He holds his hands over his bleeding torso. He is crying.

  —Help me, he says.

  The doctor puts him in the empty bathtub and fetches his medicine kit stashed under the floorboards of the kitchen. Cauterizes the gunshot wound and tries to get the bullet but it is impossible, too deep inside his chest cavity.

  —I am not a surgeon, he says. —There is nothing I can do for you but try to prevent infection. Take this. It is an antibiotic. You will probably die anyway. You are probably bleeding to death inside right now. It is good if you are. You deserve to die.

  He leaves the boy in the tub dying, God willing, while he and the neighbor drag the bodies out and line them along the front yard.

  —It was like killing a goat, the neighbor says, —killing that man.

  —That’s because these aren’t men, the doctor says.

  —That’s right, the neighbor says, —they are animals.

  But that is not what the doctor meant. Back inside he has to stop his wife from slitting the boy’s throat with the scalpel in his medicine kit. In the morning the boy is still alive and the doctor and the neighbor start burning the ones who are not. They burn them in the same pit they use for burning their trash. In the fire are burned their penises and their testicles and their sperm. One of the testicles burned contains genetic material that would have created half an American boy named Clayton. The whole town comes out to watch the bodies burn. Children peep through the doctor’s broken window hoping for a glimpse of the one they caught alive. The men of the town are impatient for the boy to heal so they can execute him.

  —You will not touch him, the doctor says.

  He delivered most of their children, has cured each of them of something at one point or another. They listen to the doctor. The boy does not die. The doctor’s wife feeds him. The doctor insists on tasting the food first, to make sure she does not poison it. They talk to the boy. Learn the story of his life. His brother convinced him to join the mercenaries. His brother is everything to him. They were starving to death in their home country.
No farming, no work of any kind. Both parents dead. No reason to live. Here, his brother told him, is our chance for a good life, to make the world a better place. If you are not fighting to save the world, his brother told him, you are fighting to ruin it. Made him choose one or the other. His brother was a murderer. He had watched him slit three boys’ throats for smoking hashish. He did not want his throat slit, he did not want to ruin the world, he wanted to have a good life. —It all made sense before, the boy says, crying. —Now it makes none. What have I done?

  One day the bullet pushes itself up from beneath the boy’s skin in his armpit. The doctor cuts it out. Soon the boy is able to walk around. Flips through their books. —Will you teach me to read? he says. The doctor begins giving him literacy lessons. Then arithmetic. He learns very quickly. He is very smart. Helps repair the damage from the gunfire, helps the neighbor with his cow. Stands guard at night with his gun. The doctor and his wife become used to caring for him. It feels very good. His wife, he can tell though she tries to hide it, enjoys cooking meals for him and checking his arithmetic and looking after his health.

  —What will we do with him? she says.

  —I don’t know, he says.

  The boy makes friends with the boys his age in the village. He is very funny and kind. People flock to him. He begins wearing his pants with one leg rolled halfway up the shin and soon all the boys in the village are wearing their pants with one leg rolled halfway up the shin. The doctor thinks, He could be prime minister one day. The organization gets in touch. A position at a hospital in Alberta, Canada. Transport out of the country tonight on a military truck under the direction of an officer who has been bribed.

  The doctor tells his wife, —Pack only one small suitcase, everything else must be left behind.

  She says, —Good riddance to it all.

  The boy is standing there listening. —What about me? he says.

  The doctor and his wife look at each other. —What about him? the doctor asks her. She sighs, groans; she cries out in frustration.

  And when the military truck comes in the night to the intersection in the field as arranged, all three of them stand there waiting for it. The soldier driving, who is very nervous, says, —What the fuck is this? There are only supposed to be two, who is this?