The shot hit the clerk square between the eyes. It was a clean shot, tantalizingly pure in its execution. Dez didn’t even hear himself cry out. He didn’t even hear the frantic honking of Charlie’s horn. He didn’t even see the headlights of the Chevy Impala which had just pulled into the parking lot some five seconds earlier until he got to the front door, leaving behind a stunned Samantha.
Dez raised his pistol and fired three rounds of the pistol into the windshield of the Impala, neither knowing nor caring if he hit his target. He clutched his bag and marched stone-lipped into the passenger street of his Trans Am, heedless of Charlie’s scowl.
Samantha limped quickly after him, her entire body shaking in horror—and fascination.
*****
The Trans Am headed west on I-44 for three miles before Charlie got his nerve up to speak. “You… stupid… FUCK,” he snarled. He repeated the epithet, and leaned on the horn. The highway was deserted at that hour. Not even the moon hung in the sky. “I should’ve known better than to open the door for you that morning. I always get a bad, bad feeling around you, Dez. A bad, bad feeling.”
“Had no choice,” Dez replied detachedly. “Self defense. A matter of saving all of our asses.”
“Self defense? Self defense?? That motherfucker couldn’t shoot straight to save his own life—a life that’s now been wasted thanks to a fuck up like you. Speak nothing of the other car you shot out. I’ve got a good mind to leave you motherfuckers by the side of the highway and head straight back to St. Louis. Last thing I need in my life is this shit!”
“Too late. You’re already an accomplice. The last thing you need is the cops back in St. Louis looking for a bronze Trans Am headed east. Drive.”
“And how you know they ain’t looking for a bronze Trans Am heading west?”
“Don’t. That’s why we’re taking our chances. Drive.”
“Fuck you!”
“Drive.”
“You tell me to drive one more time—”
Dez raised the pistol towards Charlie. “I’m telling you now. For both of our sake. For all of our sake. One. Last. Time. DRIVE.”
Charlie’s face turned pale. His brain seemed to be fueled by pure adrenalin at this point. It was the same chemical wavelength all three of them tuned into mutually; a wavelength that felt like the numbing kiss of ice in their brains. Charlie knew that Dez would never consider shooting him. Or would he? He had seen a side of Dez that was so far removed from the frightened, shivering kid from Lawrence he huddled with in the fields of Khe Sanh that he could barely recognize him. He saw a man who seemed possessed of an inner velocity and orbit that was solely his own, without regards to any other person, place or thing. A man who was so attuned to his target that he seemed to become the bullet itself.
At the same time, Charlie knew that he was stuck with him—with the both of them, for that matter - for better and worse; in sickness and in health. Until a twenty-year bit in Leavenworth do they part. A-fuckin’-men, he thought.
“OK, cool it. Dez, man… it’s me. Charlie. We’re brothers, OK? I love you. I’ll drive, OK? Just… keep cool. Let’s see if we can finally get some music on. Help us to calm down.” Charlie flipped on the radio.
“But there are seasons, brothers and sisters. All in due time. There’s a correct time and a correct place in the eyes of the lord. All in due time. You know, brothers and sisters… just the other day, I heard a popular song on the radio, and would you believe it quoted Ecclesiastes? ‘A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up’…”
Charlie flipped the radio back off. “Maybe we’ll just wait a little while until something comes on. Man, but what I wouldn’t do for a drink right now.”
Dez lit a cigarette for him and then for himself. “All in due time, Charlie. All in due time…”
“I think it’s safe to say tonight hasn’t worked out quite as smooth as you promised.”
“Matter of circumstances, that’s all. We’re alive, aren’t we? And we have the money.”
“Yeah, but at what cost?”
“No different than shooting at the Cong. Only difference is we’re civilians now. And we’re acting on our own behalf. Free will’s not always the safest option.”
“Actually, there’s a pretty substantial difference, Dez. You shot an innocent man.”
“Hardly innocent. He shot at us first.”
“That justifies taking his life?”
“It’s a question of survival. What was the value of his life, anyways? Thirty years less of some hillbilly twiddling his thumbs and playing with himself? Tomorrow, there’ll be some other hillbilly to take his place - and another, and another - maybe even more ugly and even more ignorant. They’re the sort of people who will know peace only because time will forget them. No different than the same kids we grew up in high school with—the same ones who became bankers or car salesmen or politicians for that matter. Sensation and action rarely have any logic behind them until after the fact. Sometimes, simply surviving is its own justification… regardless of the aftermath. And that’s something that’s not going to be changed by last rites or a fucking box of Kleenex.”
“And if I ratted on you?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Hypothetically speaking—”
“There’s no hypotheticals. No absolutes, either. There’s only potential and adaptation. And most people don’t have any room for either.”
“So the end justifies the means?”
“Sometimes, justification isn’t necessary. Maybe meaning isn’t, either. There’s only action and reaction. Leave interpretation to wiser people than me and you. That’s what they get paid for, isn’t it?”
“So what’s to separate us from animals?”
“Honestly? Very little. Realizing that we’re going to die one day’s probably about all. Might feel different if I was a water buffalo or a houseplant. Might have to wait for reincarnation on that one. Ask me then,” Dez chuckled to himself.
“You realize that none of us here tonight can ever go back.”
“Go back where?”
“Home.”
“Charlie, you and I haven’t been able to go back home for a long time.”
“That’s what frightens me.”
“Probably only one thing you need to be frightened of. That’s yourself.”
“Jesus, that’s rich. You pull that off a greeting card?”
“You keeps assuming that there needs to be an answer for everything. Justification. Purpose. Sometimes, accidents happen. No way of explaining or rationalizing them. Same thing happens in biology. It’s called evolution. Don’t recognize it until after the fact. Doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. It simply is. Accepting it or denying it isn’t going to change the fact. That 12-gauge could’ve torn a hole straight through my back if he had been just a little quicker. Fact is, it’s an accident I’m here with you in this car right now. I’m grateful, even if you might not be. That doesn’t mean the sun wouldn’t rise in a few hours if the son of a bitch had better aim.”
“Dez, let me ask you something I’ve been meaning to know.”
“What’s that?”
“With all the money you was pulling in dealing, how come you never bothered to install an 8 track player?”
The Trans Am barreled forward down I-44 along the onyx edges of the night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was 6:30 in the morning when the Trans Am idled in the parking lot of West Memphis. Despite Dez’s insistence that they continue driving, Charlie was adamant that they pull over before he fell asleep at the wheel. Samantha was already unresponsive in the back seat.
“I’ll take over then,” countered Dez.
“No complaints from me. Except what your next move is, kemosabe.”
“Well, we have one of two choices. Go back through Oklahoma—”
“Which ain’t going to happen.”
“Or see what we can find down in Texas for a few days. Relax
, take it easy for a few days and hit the road again. All I know is that we got to get out of Arkansas. Place gives me the creeps. Like something out of a science fiction movie.”
“Great. Now what about long term plans?”
“Well, shit. I’ve always wanted to see Nevada. And chances are we can scrounge something for work out in Vegas. Place is teeming…”
“Las Vegas? After Sammy, there ain’t room for another black man in Vegas, unless I convert to Judaism myself.”
Dez chuckled at the joke. “Don’t be so sure. Remember Bob Hutchinson? Last I heard he was working out there as a chef and living pretty comfortably. And if that brain dead jackass can pull it off, think of what the three of us can do. Besides, you have any other ideas?” There was an uncomfortable pause. “Thought so,” he continued.
“I suppose I don’t have an option.”
“You want bus fare back to St. Louis? Is there anything in particular waiting for you there? A good job? A girl? I love you to pieces, Charlie. But let’s face it. Serving up lunch at a high school isn’t exactly what you should be spending the rest of your days doing. You’ll go crazy—or go back on the needle.”
“Man… You know, for a sociopath there are moments in which you actually make sense. Lucid, like. Might be rare, and it might just be in passing, but you do occasionally make sense.”
“I’d like to think the best of our people do.”
“Our people?”
“We Sociopathic-Americans.”
“You’re not as clever as you probably think you are.”
“Never felt I had to live up to my own misperceptions. Texas, Charlie?”
“The alternatives?”
“You come up with a better one than what I told you, I’m all ears.”
“Texas it is, then. Lead on, kemosabe. Just wake me up once we get there. And Dez?”
“Yeah?”
“Try not to kill anyone else on the way.”
*****
Dez had little in the way of sleep for the past 48 hours. His nerves were a steel trap, coiled, poised to strike on its quarry with neither warning nor mercy. Its quarry, however, was Dez himself.
The events of the past three weeks played themselves out in fragments behind his eyelids, in hues of detachment and varying levels of objectivity. He had killed in self-defense before, and several dozen times; but always for the sake of a cause or on external orders. He had never killed in self-defense to save his own life. Or so he told himself.
But was it truly self-defense? Perhaps that first night. But, he thought, what about those rednecks in the parking lot of the bar? Was that purely out of saving the honor of a woman he barely even knew? Was it motivated purely by the instinct for self-preservation? Or was it tainted by revenge, by the desire to shed blood, by an overpowering tumult seething in his blood, propelling him to murder? Even the shooting of the gas station clerk not even seven hours prior technically could be claimed as self defense, at least in his eyes. But deep down—wasn’t he driven by something else entirely? Not greed. Not avarice. Not even the nobility of theft borne out of sheer necessity like some romantic Jean Val-jean of the Midwest highways; but a much darker seed that was blossoming in his soul. A drive to step beyond the boundaries of day to day morality and claim a code that was his and his alone to live by – a code that demanded true force, true action, and the purity of impulse in order to express itself. A code that branded his heart with the ferocity of a red hot iron, singing its way through the layers of pride, of silent restraint, of fear, of prejudice.
Samantha herself was begin to grow increasingly disengaged from her surroundings, experiencing them like other people might experience a pinball machine; directly, almost ritually—but ultimately as a pastime, as sheer illusion. She hadn’t been anywhere near crank for over three weeks. But she still felt the lethargy of the withdrawal playing tricks with both her mood and her peripheral vision. The waiting, the time, the very air she breathed—it all seemed like a hypnotic distraction. She felt her skin being stripped away, fragile centimeter by centimeter, in agonizingly slow motion. But what would be revealed underneath?
They drove down I-40 into the glare of the sun. Somehow, it didn’t quite seem so mocking to Dez’s eyes as it normally was. Then again, he reasoned, the purpose of an optical illusion was to persuade.
*****
It was 3 in the afternoon by the time they found themselves in downtown Plano. Though he initially planned on driving out further, even if it meant all night to the border of New Mexico, Dez simply couldn’t. The adrenalin in his bloodstream had subsided, and all he could feel was the cold distant hum of exhaustion. He needed to lie down. He needed to get his bearings together.
Downtown Plano seemed to have emerged overnight, a pre-fab cluster of office buildings, convention halls and blandly identical retail centers built on the graves of farmers and settlers. It was a city no one could get lost in, for everything reverted back to downtown, its solar plexus—a sprawling mass of concrete, glass and simulated Texan hospitality that dwarfed its visitors not by size but by its overwhelming sterility. Dez had wanted the real Texas, the wild, untamed Texas; the Texas of the Alamo, of Sam Houston, of the Apache, of the Comanche, of the Wichita. He settled for the Texas of tourist centers and tacky souvenirs.
They pulled into the parking lot of the Plano Inn. Though its beige stucco facade seemed brand new, there was a distinctly preserved sense that came over Dez, as if he was stepping into a past that was reserved for someone else entirely. He nudged Charlie awake.
“Welcome to Armadillo Town, Big Chief.”
“We in Vegas yet?”
“You changed your mind about Vegas already?”
“Anywhere is going to be better than Texas. Last time I was out here, it was like walking into a Fun House; if it was designed by Yosemite Sam.”
“Now, now, good sir,” Dez laughed. “We’re in Plano now. There’s some fine, fine golf courses and other wholesome activities for upstanding citizens such as you and I. I’m going to go get us a room. Wait here in the car. Make certain no varmints try to infringe on this fine filly here.”
Charlie waited until Dez was safely in the lobby before he turned around to Samantha. “Let me ask you a question. How old are you, anyways?”
“You already asked me that. I’m 21, remember?”
“Right. Right… 21,” he said to himself. “21. Well listen, I don’t know how long you known Dez but you notice anything different about him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, I guess. He’s always talking real strange… cryptic, you know? Like he’s on some other kind of wavelength. Other times, he’s normal. Actually kind of sweet.”
“He tell you we was in the war together?”
“Yeah, he mentioned that. A little bit.”
Charlie lit up a cigarette. “I’ve known Dez since we were in high school. Always been his own person. Always had his own rules, his own way of viewing things. We were pretty tight when we were over in ‘Nam. One night, we were on leave when our C.O. said he wanted to take us out to Laos. Turns out, he wanted to go to a brothel. Now, in all honesty neither Dez nor I were too keen on the idea - namely ‘cause our C.O. was the most arrogant son of a bitch on the face of the planet. Mean, mean temper, too. But we went along. Told him we were just gonna have ourselves a few drinks at the bar… he could do whatever the hell he wanted. He picked out a girl… couldn’t have been older than 17. Maybe 18. And he goes back to the room with her. Comes back out 20 minutes later, asks us both to come in. This little girl is crying, and I mean real tears. And this son of a bitch C.O. is just screaming at her, calling her every goddamn ugly name imaginable, and he’s kicking her, telling her how worthless she is. Spitting on her. Just really roughing her up. It turns out that what the C.O. wanted was the three of us with her. But he didn’t wanna pay extra. We was dead set on high-tailing it out of there, but he kept his pistol on us. Told us we had no choice. We didn’t. It was just… really, really brutal. I rememb
er looking at Dez and seeing his face turn completely blank. I mean, something just took over him, like he was a robot or something. I went first, and I did it quickly… just wanted to get it over and done with. Then, it was Dez’s turn. And the look in his eyes… it was like he wasn’t human. Like his eyes turned inward. It was horrifying ‘cause I realized that he was blacking out. Like he was trying to separate himself from what his body was doing. As if he wasn’t his body. He was never exactly the same after that night. He was pretty shook up about it. Didn’t utter a single word for weeks after, just stared straight ahead at you. Through you. I ain’t saying this to frighten you, honey but… last night, I saw the same look on Dez’s face that he had on the night of…” Charlie’s eyes started to well up in tears, thin and glassy. “The night of… the… the,” he stammered.
“It was rape, Charlie. And that girl wasn’t the only one raped that night. You both were.” Samantha reached out her fingers to the sides of Charlie’s eyes and brushed away his tears, kissing the top of his head softly.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dez had only been asleep for five hours when he felt Samantha’s hand prodding him awake. “Dez… baby…. wake up. Come on. I got something to show you.”
“What day is it?”
“It’s still Monday, baby.”
“Wake me up when it’s morning.”
“Baby… Come on. This is important.”
“What is it?”
“We were gonna wait, but we couldn’t stop ourselves. You know our score?”
“Mmmm.”
“I thought you said it was gonna be about $500.”
“Seems about right.”
ROMANCE: THREESOME : Billionaire Brothers' Party (MFM Menage Romance) (New Adult Contemporary Threesome Short Stories) Page 105
