The First

by Glen Kenner

  The automatic gunfire from the garage explodes again and I focus back on the garage. But I can no longer see Sarah, only flashes of light from the very back of the garage. I jump up and run as fast as I can toward it. In the few seconds it takes me to run into the darkness, the gunfire stops.

  -Sarah? Sarah!

  I yell for her but there’s nothing. Then my eyes adjust and in the dim light and gunsmoke, I see her red dress and then make out her darker features. She’s standing just a few feet away and looking down. She turns to me and asks if I’m alright.

  -Me? How about you? Are you alright?

  I grab her hand and we walk back out into the dimming light. Big raindrops are falling, spaced wide apart but multiplying.

  -I’m hit in the arm and I guess in my ribcage.

  She’s feeling around under her right underarm and I hold up her arm carefully and look.

  -There’s a big hole in your dress alright. You feel ok?

  -It burns. And there’s a deep soreness, like a pulled muscle, I guess. You got hit twice, huh?

  -Looks like it.

  We look down at Cowboy. His face is a dark shade of purple. He died holding one hand around his neck.

  -That must have been painful.

  -Someone points a gun at your head, you kill them. You taught me that.

  -I guess I did.

  And then we both see the dog at the same time. Fuck. Looks like he took a random shot to the head. Lots of blood on the pavement. He must have tried to crawl under the truck but didn’t get far before he died.

  -How’s the shooter in the garage?

  -Very dead.

  -Good. Fuck him.

  -Fuck her. She was probably seventy years old. Maybe his mother.

  I shrug and look around the alley. I don’t see any faces peeking out from other garages or over any fences. Nobody wants to get involved. Nobody wants to be seen. Maybe nobody cares.

  The rain picks up and we both hear the siren at the same time. I guess someone called it in after all. Chalk one up for humanity.

  -Fuck. Let’s clean this up. Throw everything in there.

  I point to the open garage and then check Cowboy’s pockets and find a small amount of cash and the truck keys. I keep the cash. Then I pick him up by his one arm and his belt and toss him into the darkness of the garage and then his arm and his keys. Sarah puts all of the guns back onto the sleeping bag and then rolls it up and throws it in the garage. Then she comes back and pulls the pit bull out from under the truck and yells out.

  -He’s alive, John! He’s alive!

  She holds him tight and we look at his head.

  -The shot just took his ear off and a lot of fur!

  She wipes blood away from the side of his face.

  -His whole ear’s gone. He’s in shock. Poor baby.

  The dog opens his eyes and growls but doesn’t try to get out of Sarah’s arms.

  I look in the pickup and find a bunch of napkins in a Hardee’s bag. Sarah uses the napkins to apply pressure. I unhook his leash and then run over to the garage and pull the door down. Then I go back to the pickup and look inside again, in the glove compartment and under and behind the seats. More fast food bags, empty Natty Light cans and a tattoo magazine. He really didn’t have any automatic weapons.

  -No more weapons in the truck.

  -He was probably going to rob us. Racist prick.

  -Shit. What about the gun the old lady had? Sounded like an automatic shotgun to me. That’s what we came for!

  -It was a semi-auto rifle with a bump stock. Gives it terrible accuracy.

  -It’s better than nothing.

  -Doesn’t matter. The old lady isn’t the only thing that’s in two pieces in there.

  I don’t have any reply to that and turn back to the truck. I push down the door lock, reach over to the driver’s door and push down that lock and jump out, closing the passenger door behind me. I’m tempted to take the truck but that just serves to complicate things. Simplify, not complicate. That’s the number one way to stay out of trouble.

  There’s a lot of blood on the concrete but the rain is starting to wash it away. With the siren closer, we can tell it’s coming from the west, which is convenient since we have a long walk ahead of us to the east back to Alex’s condo. And then I remember Samir, my new friend from Sudan.

  We take off walking at a fast pace and I turn to Sarah and tell her over the rain that we can call Samir if we can find a phone. She nods, kisses the pit on the head, and then points to my chest and her arm.

  -You think we can get these bullets out first?

  Four blocks east and then two blocks south is a Walgreens. I like Walgreens. They’ve been around for a hundred years. I had a few hundred shares of Walgreens when I left New York. Wonder if they’re worth anything now?

  In St Louis, a Walgreens out in West County or South County is a big, bright place with smiling employees and huge aisles of everything you need. Walgreens in the city, not so much. This Walgreens has bars on the windows. The only person I see smiling is an old guy standing in front of the magazines, flipping through a copy of something with women in bikinis. In the beauty aisle we find a metal nail file, five inches long. I open the package and flex the metal. It’ll do. We cut over to the far side of the store and I grab a Mountain Dew and a Diet Dr Pepper for Sarah and two cold roast beef sandwiches. At the counter, I pay in cash and ask to use the restroom. At this Walgreens, you have to get permission to use the restroom and then they give you a key attached to a keyring attached to a loop at the top of a mop. The keyring looks welded into one solid piece of metal. I make a joke about mopping up the bathroom when I’m done but the clerk doesn’t smile. I guess she’s heard that one before. I doubt a Walgreens in West County has a mop attached to the restroom key. I’d be amazed if the restrooms even require a key. Then the clerk looks to Sarah and sees the pit. She tells Sarah that she can’t bring a dog in here.

  I step in front of Sarah.

  -Service animal. Don’t make me call my high-priced, super-sexy lawyer.

  The clerk shrugs and goes back to her phone.

  I look over my shoulder to Sarah on our way to the back of the store.

  -You’re my lawyer, by the way.

  -Not Alex?

  -Shit, you’re right. I probably need two lawyers.

  Somehow she manages to kick me pretty damn hard in the ass.

  In the restroom, Sarah puts down the dog and we dry off the best we can with paper towels. Sarah then sits down on the edge of the toilet and motions for me to take off my shirt. I do and she has me turn a bit to get better lighting and then she digs in, first the hole in my shoulder and then my chest. It hurts like hell but I tell her that she’s doing great, I hardly feel anything.

  She holds up both bullets in her hand for me to see. They look like stomped on tiny mushrooms.

  -Hollow points. Cop killers. They’re designed to go in and then kind of bloom outward for maximum damage.

  -I’ve heard of them. Thought they were illegal.

  -Maybe in some states. They’re not in Texas. I don’t know about Missouri. Cops everywhere use them. I think they’re banned for use in war by some international convention.

  -Can’t use them against our enemies, only our citizens.

  -Maybe. Anyway, they really hurt.

  -Going in and coming out.

  -Hey, you said you hardly felt that!

  -I’m talking about you. You’re gonna be crying like a girl.

  -I am a girl!

  -Huh. Let’s trade places.

  We switch places and Sarah looks down at me sitting on the edge of the toilet.

  -Tell me the truth. Did you really think you could just walk into a back alley and buy a fully automatic weapon?

  -Yeah. I did.

  -What made you think that?

  -Oh, I don’t know, maybe just every gritty street crime movie ever made.

  -Seriously?

  She lifts up the side of her dress and holds i
t in place with her left hand, her right arm stretched straight up.

  -Yeah, uh...

  Those legs and the curve of her hip and that small strip of pink underwear and her toned stomach and the soft underside of her breast…

  I stare at the hole in her ribcage and focus and take a deep breath.

  -Seriously. Uh, this will hurt. If I can even find it.

  I put the bloody nail file in my mouth and using both hands on her hips I turn the right side of her body slightly back.

  -That’s as much light as I’m going to get. Hold right there and try not to scream. Someone might call the cops.

  She bends her right elbow and puts the meaty flesh below her thumb into her mouth and bites down. I slide the metal file in like playing that kids’ game. Operation. Steady hand, file inside, something solid. Bone. It’s her rib. It feels like it’s chipped on the topside. Damnit.

  -It got past your ribs. It came in at an upward angle. Hmm. It should have torn through your lung but I don’t know where it would end up. It could have bounced around a bit. It might be lodged in your heart. Assuming…

  I shift over to her other side, lift up her dress, focus focus focus on her ribcage and then let that side of her dress fall back.

  -Nope. Didn’t come out anywhere over there. Looks like it’s in there somewhere.

  -Well that doesn’t sound so great.

  -You say it burns?

  -The hole burns. There’s a soreness deeper in my chest.

  -Maybe we should go to the hospital. I hate to, but I don’t know how your body’s going to handle a hollow point to the heart.

  She lets her dress fall back in place and turns her right bicep to me.

  -Get this one out and I’ll see how I feel later.

  I pry the bullet out of her arm and then we take turns washing away the blood from our wounds at the sink. She can’t see the ragged hole on the back of her neck where a chunk of flesh got blown off but it’s already looking a little better. I wash it for her. We look at ourselves in the mirror. Some open wounds, a few holes in our clothing, a missing ear on the pup, but all in all, the three of us look alright. My hair looks fucking perfect.

  Outside of Walgreens, the rain has stopped, the sun is trying to push through the clouds, and we don’t hear any sirens. We head east while eating our sandwiches and drinking our sodas. At a liquor store covered in bars and neon beer signs, we walk in and I ask the clerk if I can use the phone. Without looking up from a magazine he points to the back near a set of doors to a payphone. Fuck me running. A payphone.

  -Can I get change for a buck? For the phone.

  -You need to buy something.

  -Man, really? That’s how you treat a guy?

  -Store policy.

  -Shit. That’s not going to help your Yelp review.

  -Yelp on this.

  He grabs his package. He still hasn’t looked up from his magazine. I lean over and see why.

  Sarah and I walk the aisles. I’ve been drinking cheap beer for too long. I don’t recognize half of these brands of liquor.

  -Where’s the rum? Gosling’s.

  -Other side.

  Sounds like he didn’t even look up.

  We find the rum. Sarah grabs a bottle of Gosling’s Family Reserve Old Rum. Seventy-one bucks. I let out a low whistle.

  -Yeah?

  She nods and smiles.

  -Yeah.

  The pit growls.

  The clerk finally tears himself away from his magazine, rings us up and gives me back a dollar’s worth of quarters. I call Samir and he says he can be here in fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty.

  Sarah and I walk outside and the sun is in full shine. I take a big breath and fill my lungs.

  -I love the smell of the city after a hard rain.

  -Really?

  -No. Not really.

  We walk around the corner of the liquor store and into a narrow alley. A small stream of water is running down the middle of the broken pavement between the two buildings, out over the sidewalk, and into a drain in the street. We lean up against the wall, the toes of our shoes in the small stream causing it to bulge out a bit on the other side. I twist off the cap of the rum and hand it to Sarah and she cradles the pit in one arm, takes the bottle and takes a small drink and then a longer one.

  -I’ve never had rum straight.

  She hands the bottle back to me.

  -I’ve never had it mixed.

  That makes her laugh and I recognize it. That laugh. I’ve heard it a thousand times. I’ve done it myself at least as much. She’s letting the emotions out. The liquor displaces the emotions, even from the first drink. Fear, usually. Anger. Hatred. Self-hatred. Shame. It’s probably why most people drink after the age of thirty.

  I take a long pull on the bottle and hand it back. She holds it for a few seconds and stares at the brick wall across the alley from us.

  -You were going to kill me, with that sledgehammer, because you thought I had turned into a Second. Right?

  -That was the plan.

  -Why?

  -If you ever see a Second, you’ll know the answer to that question.

  -Ok, but what if I was a Second and that hit with the sledgehammer hadn’t killed me? Then what?

  -I would have tried to hit you again.

  -What are the odds you would have succeeded? That I would have died and you would have lived?

  -Not good.

  -So, again, why? Why not just go home and watch the news to see what happened? Local law student found dead in her apartment. Neighbors say that she looked healthy earlier that day. Or, University City police are baffled by a gruesome murder spree of several residents in the same fourplex. There are no suspects and no leads. Why risk your life?

  -It was my responsibility. I found you out on Delmar. I knew what was happening. Of anyone else in the city, maybe anywhere, I’m the most capable of killing a Second.

  -Sounds like a suicide mission to me.

  -Maybe. But sometimes that’s the mission you have to go on.

  That hangs out there for a minute. It probably means something different to me than it does her.

  -How many Thirds do you think a Second kills every year?

  -No idea. Impossible to say. General consensus is that they eat heavily every few weeks and then nothing. But there are lots of cases of Seconds eating wild animals, livestock, even dead bodies in cemeteries and battlefields. They’re the vultures of humanity.

  -How long do Seconds live? Four to five thousand years like Firsts? Other than you, apparently.

  -No. Seconds don’t fucking die. I mean, no one knows if they are immortal or simply live longer than we’ve all been around. Maybe they live twenty thousand years. Or fifty. Or forever. No one knows.

  -So if you kill a brand new Second, you’re saving thousands and thousands of lives over the coming millennia.

  -I guess so. Might just be saving a lot of chickens. Who knows.

  She finally takes a drink of the rum but doesn’t pass it back. Instead she swirls it around in the bottle a bit and looks down the neck at the brown liquid.

  -You ever feel bad about killing people? I mean, back whenever. When it was new to you?

  -Sometimes. Not so much when they were trying to kill me first.

  -I guess that’s the deciding factor, right? If they deserve it, it’s justice. But if they don’t?

  -If they don’t, you did something wrong. Never lie to yourself about that. Because that’s the beginning of the end, once you start justifying murder.

  I take the bottle back and take a long drink and hold it in my mouth and then swallow it. This is good rum. I could happily go broke drinking rum like this. I hand the bottle back.

  -You know from experience.

  She states this as a fact. And it is. I do know from experience. I have murdered so many I could never remember all of their faces.

  -I do. I told you when we talked about the guy in Paris that there aren’t any laws for Firsts. No judges and no juri
es.

  -I remember.

  -Well, it’s true. But only to a point. You still pass judgement on yourself. If you excuse everything you do, you’ll become a psychopath. If you don’t excuse anything you do, you’ll freeze up, unable to defend even yourself. Unable to think. Somewhere in the middle is where you acknowledge your wrongs, tell yourself you’ll do your best not to commit them again, and then honesty try to uphold that commitment.

  -Is that what you do?

  -It’s what I do now. Not so fucking well, I know, but I’m sincerely working on it. It took a promise to someone to make me want to do it.

  -You had a woman in your life at some point, I guess. A woman you loved.

  -I did. I’ve had a lot of women.

  -Man-whore!

  We both laugh.

  -That’s me. But a few of them I thought I might have loved. Then one came along that I knew I loved. I knew it as well as I knew anything in my life.

  -Can you tell me about her sometime?

  -That story has a sad ending.

  -I like sad endings.

  -You’re too young to like sad endings.

  Just then Samir rolls slowly by the alley and sees us and stops and honks. We get into the cab, Sarah cradling the pit like a baby, and I give him the address for Alex’s condo.

  -Yes, yes. I know.

  20 - A New Kid In Crack Town

  Samir drops us off at the condo building and as I’m entering the access code, Glen Ray calls out. He’s got that goofy-ass smile on his face and a few plastic store bags. We wait for him to jog his pudgy body to the door and we all go in together.

  -You got a dog?

  -Yup.

  -He only has one ear.

  -Yup.

  -Sweet.

  Upstairs in the condo, Alex has left a note that she’s at the law library. Back before midnight. We sit down at the breakfast table again and Glen Ray opens one of his bags and pulls out a ton of junk food. Little Debbie brownies, Hostess Cupcakes and fruit pies, peanut M&Ms, peanut butter crackers and one of the big bags of pepperoni Combos. I grab for the Combos at the same time as Glen Ray.