Piggyback

by Tom Pitts

  The woman looked up and smiled, exposing the same toothless gaps as her husband. She patted the cushion to her left. “Hi there, I’m Maria, don’t mind the mess, it never goes anywhere anyway. Sit down for a minute, sit down.”

  Jimmy obliged and sat down directly in front of a beer can that was bent into a pipe. Charred, ragged holes formed a bowl in the fold with a larger one punched into the end to make a carburetor. It sat on top of a short stack of old TV guides. Years and years old. Among the heaps of clutter on the coffee table, Jimmy noticed several orange caps belonging to syringes. He hoped his ass wouldn’t find their counterparts in the sofa. In front of the coffee table stood two TV’s. The bottom one was off and had a spider-web crack across the screen and the one on the top showed a video game frozen in its frame.

  The man still stood near the door, looking uncomfortable, like he hadn’t let anyone inside his house in years. He probably hadn’t.

  “My name is Richard. I was just saying that I’m trying to hook-up with the kids and Jerrod said that they might be stopping by.”

  “My Jerrod? Oh, I doubt that. That kid hasn’t been around here for months.”

  “Months, huh?” Jimmy tried to scan the room for clues but there was so much clutter it hurt his head. These two were obviously tweakers, not cokeheads. The glass pipe was for meth and the missing teeth, the garbage, were all fallout. The only conclusion he could draw was: no wonder the kid hadn’t been there for months. It was a wonder he hadn’t been gone for years.

  “Terry, sit down, you’re makin’ us nervous. Richard, would you like something to drink?”

  “I don’t think he wants nothing to drink, Maria.”

  “Terry, let the man answer for himself. Richard, would you like a beer, or a soda, or I think we have some Gatorade?”

  “I’m fine, but I was wondering, do you have any way of reaching these kids.”

  “I thought you were her uncle,” said Terry. “Don’t you have a phone number or something?” His tone was getting more suspicious, more hostile. He had started to pace back and for the in front of the TV’s. He felt in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Finding none, he began to open empty packs placed all over the room, hunting for a smoke. He found one, finally, inside a pack on top of the end-table where his wife had hidden the contraband. He lit up, blowing smoke across the couch.

  “Terry, that’s rude. Does smoke bother you, Richard?”

  Terry didn’t wait for Jimmy to answer. “Rude? It’s my fucking house. I’ll smoke when I want.”

  Maria ignored him, “Don’t mind him, he gets cranky if he doesn’t get his way.”

  Jimmy was between them now, turning his head from right to left like he was watching a tennis match.

  “Cranky? That’s the bitch calling the kettle black. What’s it to him if I smoke, it ain’t gonna kill him. You don’t even know who the fuck this guy is, Maria.”

  “He told you. He’s Becky’s uncle. Weren’t you listening?” Maria smiled at Jimmy. “He never listens.”

  “I seem to recall,” Terry said, straightening back up and blowing out a thick pillow of grey smoke, “that Becky has no Uncle.”

  “Oh Terry, how would you know?”

  “So, what is it there, Richard? Are you a brother to Becky’s mom or dad?”

  Jimmy paused a moment. He didn’t want to gamble on an answer.

  “Maybe you’re just one of them funny uncles. Is that what you are?”

  “I don’t appreciate your line of inquiry.”

  “Line of bullshit is more like it. Which is it, mom or dad?”

  Maria seemed to get more nervous with the rising tension. She reached across Jimmy and picked up the pack of cigarettes off the end-table and started picking through the debris on the coffee table looking for a light. She picked up three Bic lighters before finding one that worked.

  “Dad,” said Jimmy.

  “Bullshit, her dad is long dead and buried. Who the fuck are you, pal?”

  “Terry, please.” Maria was all at once embarrassed and confused. She dragged deeply on her cigarette and blew the smoke up and away from the couch.

  “What? Why are you being so nice to this guy? You know this guy from somewhere? Is this the guy that’s been calling the house?”

  Jimmy’d had enough. These losers weren’t going to tell him anything useful. He stood up.

  “Where the fuck you think you’re going? You got some questions to answer.” Terry pointed a hooked, dirty finger at Jimmy.

  Jimmy stayed calm and said, “I didn’t come here to answer questions, I came here to ask them.”

  “I wanna know what the fuck you’re doing in my house, Mister.” Terry’s voice rose with each syllable. Tiny bits of spittle flew from his mouth.

  “I’m leaving. That’s what I’m doing.” Jimmy stepped out from behind the coffee table. He was close enough now to Terry that he could smell his foul breath. Jimmy punched him squarely in the stomach, his fist sinking in deep as the air expelled from Terry’s lungs. Terry dropped, curling up, trying to make some sort of sound.

  Maria shrieked from the couch.

  Jimmy turned to her and said, “Don’t get up.”

  “Fuck you, asshole.” Her face was contorted into an ugly sneer as she started to get off the couch.

  Jimmy spoke as slowly and as clearly as he could, “Don’t—get—up.”

  He then turned his back on the room and walked the short distance to the front door. Terry was still on the floor, curled up, still trying to make some sort of threat.

  “Terry’s gonna kill you, you son of a bitch.” Maria was on her feet now.

  Jimmy, with his had on the doorknob, turned and said, “Smoke some more meth, maybe you’ll feel better,” and walked out of the house toward the car. He could hear her yelling, “Get him, Terry, get him,” at her useless husband as he climbed into the driver’s seat of the Camry.

  “How’d that go?” asked Paul. “Took ya long enough.”

  “Not too good,” was all Jimmy said. He keyed the ignition and spat a little gravel from the driveway toward the house.

  They hadn’t even reached the road when they heard a loud gunshot. One single shot. Jimmy looked in his rearview mirror and saw Terry standing in the doorway holding a pistol in his hand. The tires gripped the asphalt of the main road and they were gone.

  “What the fuck, did that guy shoot at us?” Paul was immediately wide-eyed and sober. He patted his chest, checking for bullet-holes, or a cigarette, or both.

  “It seems that way.” Jimmy was driving 35 mph, hoping not to attract any attention.

  “You okay?” Paul asked Jimmy before turning around and asking Tristan, “You okay? Holy shit.”

  Tristan nodded. Paul unscrewed the cap to his Jim Beam and took a healthy pull.

  “Jesus Christ, Jimmy, what the fuck? Did those guys have my shit? What the hell happened?”

  “Nothing,” Jimmy answered, not registering that Paul had used his name again. “Nothing at all.”

  Jimmy kept his eyes on the road and drove straight north. Pulled over under a streetlight and got out of the car. Jimmy walked to the back and looked at the trunk. There was a single hole, round and perfect, on the right side of the trunk right under the word Camry. He opened the trunk. Inside, Jerrod was still. There was a round and perfect hole right in the middle of his forehead, too. It would have looked like a third eye except for the steady stream of blood pulsing from it. The blood ran in a straight line down into the boy’s dreadlocks and was beginning to puddle, a throbbing creek of red straight down into his matted hair. From the size of the hole, Jimmy figured it was only a .22. But it was enough, apparently. Jimmy closed the hood and got back into the car.

  “Is he all right back there?” asked Paul.

  “He’s fine. Anybody else hungry?”

  They drove for a while in silence until Jimmy spotted a drive-thru. In-N-Out Burgers. Jimmy pulled into the parking area, avoiding the long line of cars waiting for the drive-t
hru window, and parked in the back of the lot.

  “Stay in the car.”

  Jimmy went inside and ordered a double cheeseburger, fries, a chocolate shake, and an In-N-Out bumper sticker. To go. When he reached the car he saw Paul leaning on the hood, smoking.

  “I thought I told you to say in the car.”

  “Jeez, Jimmy, I’m a little wound up. That really freaked me out.”

  “Stop doing so much blow. Here, have some fries. Now, get back in the car.”

  Paul took the cardboard dish of fries and climbed back into the front seat, offering some to their prisoner. Jimmy walked around to the back of the car, set his food on the hood, took the bumper sticker out of the burger bag and peeled off the backing. He placed the sticker squarely over the round hole and smoothed it out with his hand. He got back into the driver seat. The fries sat untouched between the two seats.

  “Not hungry?” he said before unwrapping his burger and taking a big sloppy bite. He chewed quietly while the other two watched, then took two more bites, a long suck off the milkshake, and dropped the food out the window. “Me either.”

  “What’s up with your mother?” asked Becky.

  “I told you she’s drunk. She’s always drunk.”

  “No, I mean, what is she doing home?”

  “Her and Dad had another fight. They always fight.”

  “No, Shelly, I mean, this is going to fuck up our thing with the boys. They’re supposed to be here soon and your mom is stomping around the house like, like, I don’t know, a big drunk bitch.”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. She’ll pass out and we’ll just walk right past her when the boys get here. She’s not gonna mess anything up.”

  They sat on Shelly’s bed with the ashtray between them. The window was wide open to air-out the smoke from the joint they’d started downstairs. The room had changed very little since Shelly’s high school years. There were outdated band posters on her walls—walls still adorned with girlish pink wall paper. There was white wood furniture to match her white four-poster bed, and a small pile of stuffed animals stacked in a pyramid near the pillows. In fact, Shelly’s room hadn’t changed much since she was twelve.

  “Worst case scenario,” she said, using a phrase that she’d borrowed from her father, “she’ll be conscious enough to embarrass us.”

  “What’s the best case scenario?”

  “She’ll die of alcohol poisoning.”

  Tristan sat quietly in the backseat trying to think of ways to communicate with his friend in the trunk. Once or twice threw his upper torso backward before realizing that this, even if they had worked out some sort of primitive Morse code, would be pointless. There was no way thumping on the soft seat would be noticed by anyone but his captors. He tried sticking his hands in between the cushions, vainly hoping that his fingers would penetrate the solid steel that separated them. Stomping on the floor might bring better results, he thought, until he saw Jimmy eyeing him in the rearview mirror. He sighed, felt like weeping. He realized that, even if he could communicate with his friend, he had no idea what it was he would tell him. That he was in exactly the same spot as he had been an hour ago? That the situation seemed as hopeless as the moment they walked out of their house?

  Jimmy noticed the kid in back getting bolder. Squirming and fidgeting like a punk in the back seat of a squad car trying to hide his stash. He looked at the clock on the dash, it was still before midnight. This long day was going to get longer. The thought occurred to him that he never should have answered the feeble knock at his door so many hours ago. He looked over at Paul, who was getting drunker by the moment. Paul was now singing along to almost every song on the radio. Words that he didn’t know, he made up, substituting child-like rhymes where the commonplace lyrics were. Jimmy watched the level on Paul’s bottle of Jim Beam get lower and lower. Soon he’d be asking for another liquor store stop.

  Paul was mangling the lyrics for Cat Scratch Fever when he finally gave in to his impulses. He took the square baggie from his pocket and keyed himself four healthy bumps of coke. Jimmy gave him a flat unemotional look and Paul said, “What? Fuck it. What’s he gonna do? Complain?”

  “I think it’s time that I called Jose.”

  “Jose? What for? I thought you were onto something. Do we really need to call him yet? I thought we were gonna find the stuff first, then call, so he wouldn’t be so pissed.”

  Even the mention of Jose’s name had a sobering effect on Paul. He immediately unscrewed the cap on the bottle and threw back another hit of the whiskey. Emboldened by the blow and the booze, he turned toward their prisoner in the back seat and said, “You fucks better tell us what we wanna know or this night ain’t never gonna end. What the fuck is the matter with you two? Do you have any idea how deep in the shit-pile you are? Do you have any idea what or who you’re fucking with?”

  As Paul’s threats turned to pleas, Jimmy turned into an empty lot in front of a mini-mall. There were spots for five shops, three of them vacant, the other two closed. Jimmy pulled the Camry under a streetlight and killed the engine.

  “I want to talk with you.”

  “What, there ain’t nothing open here.”

  “Outside, c’mon.” Jimmy’s voice was deadpan, like always, but even Tristan could see that Paul was suddenly nervous. Jimmy and Paul got out and Jimmy pointed with his chin toward the rear of the car.

  “C’mere, I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Look, Paul, sometimes things complicate themselves. There ain’t no problem that can’t be handled, but sometimes problems just present themselves.”

  “Yeah,” said Paul, but he had no idea what his friend was getting at.

  “I’m going to show you something, but I swear to God, if you freak out, if you don’t handle this like a man, you getting in the trunk, too.”

  “Okay, what?” Paul could feel himself teetering some from the whiskey, he flared his numb nostrils and blinked his eyes to ready himself for whatever Jimmy was going to show-and-tell.

  Jimmy popped the trunk.

  Jerrod lay there looking stiff and blue. His eyes, wide open, had begun to cloud over and the once free-flowing stream of blood from the center of his forehead had begun to blacken and crust.

  “Oh, shit,” was all Paul could manage.

  Jimmy kept his eyes on Paul, gauging his reaction, making sure he didn’t go into shock … or vomit.

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Jimmy shut the trunk and Paul snapped out of it.

  “Oh, man, did you shoot him, Jimmy?”

  “No, I didn’t shoot him, his old man shot him.”

  The single gunshot echoed in Paul’s memory.

  “Holy fuck, what’re the odds? The old man? His old man? How did that happen? This is no good, man. What’re the fucking odds?” he repeated. “Not to mention the obvious irony. Holy shit, poor kid got taken out by his own father? Shit.”

  Paul was babbling enough to convince Jimmy that he wasn’t going into shock.

  “This is why it’s time to call Jose. It’s time to reassess.”

  “What the hell are we gonna do with him?”

  “Keep your voice down, I want the dumbass in there to keep thinking he’s alive.”

  The reality of their backseat witness suddenly dawned on Paul and his voice got even louder. “What are we gonna do with him?” he said, hooking a thumb at Tristan.

  “I dunno, the prognosis ain’t good, though.”

  Paul was confused. He wasn’t sure what a prognosis was.

  Jimmy held his hands out. “Look, in this game, this business, accidents happen. Shit can be fixed—sort of. But for us to go on, we need to talk to someone with a little more authority, someone who’s a little more invested.”

  “Invested? Who the fuck is more invested than us? We’re travelling around with a fucking dead body in the trunk of our car,” Paul squeaked.

  “Sshh, I know, I know,” said Jimmy, suddenly sounding m
ore like a real-estate broker or insurance salesman, “Look, Paul, no one is more invested in seeing you get through this problem than me. Okay? Okay. This is just a setback. We’re still going to do what we came to do. You just need to calm down, shut up, and stop being so fucked up so we don’t spook the kid in there. Now go stand in front of the car and have a cigarette while I call our friend Jose.”

  “Jimmy?” Paul shared his tone with every eight-year-old who’s ever been scolded by his mother for ruining his appetite with too much cake and then comes back to the kitchen to ask for a cookie.

  “What?”

  “Can we still stop at a liquor store?”

  Twenty more minutes had gone by and the boys had still not called. The girls were listening to an endless playlist of mp3’s Shelly had programmed onto her phone. The phone was plugged into her portable stereo. The girls, the stereo, and the phones all sat atop the four-poster bed.

  “Are you sure it’s gonna ring while it’s playing songs?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’ve done it a million times.”

  Becky looked at her own phone, devoid of any attachments. It, too, sat mute.

  “What the fuck, they should have at least called by now, it’s almost midnight.”

  “I told you, I talked to Tristan. He said they were running late, but they’d be here. It’s Jerrod’s fault, he’s the one that’s all fucked up. He should have been driving too.”