FENCE

by Nathan Wrann

  Who said what. Who cried first. Who came first.

  Ha. Had to be her. I do remember her smoking. I remember her leaving. Putting her jeans on. Putting her t-shirt on. Yeah. T-shirt and jeans. She wore them just for me.

  She might have said something about California. Then she left. That was it. That was the end. I remembered it the next day, and the next and the next. I tried to forget after I didn’t hear from her for a week. Then two weeks. Then I don’t know how long and the fucking picture shows up in my mailbox. But I made myself forget it. Now, two and a half months later I’m trying to remember what we did? Who said what? Stupid. I bet if nothing happened we’d still be friends.

  My stomach drops and I get hot again.

  The frame shatters when it hits the wall. I don’t remember throwing it. Time to go. I stand and rub my eyes. The cigarette has a few more drags left and I don’t want to waste it.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I hear Kevin behind me. He’s at the door.

  “Shit. Uh. I just needed a place to chill out. I just had to get away from everyone for a minute.”

  “No. I mean at the funeral. What are you doing at the funeral?”

  I drop the cigarette in my empty beer can and grab the unopened one off the bed. I turn it over in my hands a few times looking at the label.

  “I uh. I don’t know.” I fumble over the words.

  “Hey man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I get it. You guys were friends.” I can’t tell if he’s sincere but he continues. “Are you still at the community college?”

  “Huh?” He’s making small talk with me like I give a fuck. “Uh, yeah. I guess.”

  “That’s good.” He sounds sincere.

  “Yeah. Monty made me take a class.”

  “She was good like that. She made me do stuff I didn’t think I wanted to do.” He says with a forced chuckle.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Just stuff. You know.”

  “Not really. She wasn’t too bossy when I knew her. We just hung out.”

  “Well not bossy, but—” He stops to come up with the right words. “I don’t know. Maybe people change?”

  “Not in the Southside.” A heavy quiet clouds the room. I guess Kevin is all right, just born on the wrong side of the cemetery.

  “She was getting out of The Southside.” He breaks the silence with an idiotic statement. And follows it up with an even dumber one: “maybe you can too.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get out. Maybe I like it there. That’s the problem with all you Northies. You think there’s nothing good in The Southside. That we all want to be with you in The Northside—”

  “No that’s not what I meant.” He cuts me off.

  “Well fuck you. You go to the same college I go to. You’re no better than me.”

  “I’m transferring to a real school in the fall.”

  “What does that even mean? A real school. Is the fuckin’ community college fake?” My voice is raspy. The pain in my throat gives it an edge.

  “No. You know what I mean.” He says backing down.

  “What was Monty gonna do when you went to a real school?”

  “I don’t know. We would have worked something out. I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  “You would have worked something out? Did you love her?”

  “Yeah.” He replies without thinking.

  “Whatever.” I’m done with this conversation so I head for the door.

  “Did you?” He asks.

  “What?”

  “Love her. Did you love her?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Well did you hook up with her?”

  “No.” I snap back. He doesn’t need to know shit.

  “You wanted to though.” He says it like he knows who the fuck I am.

  “Not after she fucked you, you prick. That’s why we stopped hanging out ya know. Right after your party I told her I didn’t want to hang out with her anymore if she was gonna hang out with Northside douchebags. She said you weren’t that great and she said she wanted me but I told her it was too fuckin’ late.” The story just falls out of my mouth.

  “You know. I’m glad she stopped hanging out with you.” He notices the broken picture frame on the floor.

  “I stopped hanging out with her.” I correct him.

  “You and your rapist friend, Jake, were bad influences on her.”

  My fist clenches around the beer can and my neck feels like a cinder block.

  “She told me all about him,” he continues. “She told me how he took advantage of her when she was thirteen. Thirteen for Christ’s sake. That’s just not right.”

  “You know what’s not right!” I burst back. “You cause this fucking accident and my best fuckin’ friend dies, but you only end up with a broken leg.”

  “Your best friend? Ha! She didn’t even acknowledge you the other day.”

  “Fuck you.” I’m out of things to say to this prick.

  “We saw you outside the liquor store, where you work and she said it wasn’t you but I knew it was. She didn’t even want to look at you.”

  “Bullshit. When?”

  “Two days ago… the day of…” Kevin’s words choke off and he starts bawling. He tries hiding it but I can see he’s blowin’ up inside. He picks up the photo from the frame.

  “So what? So what if she didn’t say it was me. I loved her! You killed her and all you got was a fucking broken leg. It’s not fair! You’re a fuckin’ pussy.”

  “It’s not fair to you?” He cries back to me. “I loved her! And I killed my fucking baby. How do you think that makes me feel?”

  “I don’t give a shit how you feel. Your baby? Was that what you called her? Her name was Monty. Your baby.”

  “No asshole. She was pregnant. She was pregnant with my baby.” He sits on the bed holding the photo in his hand. “About two months. Nobody knew. She had names picked out and everything.”

  “Really?” I oughta smash this fuck’s face in right now.

  “Yeah. If it was a boy it was going to be Lloyd. If it was a girl she was gonna name it Rosemary.”

  I practically choke but hold it back and growl: “That’s pretty fucked up.”

  “What?” He asks still focusing on the photo in his hands.

  “Nothing.” I can hardly think. But he keeps blabbing.

  “I don’t know what I was gonna do. I didn’t really have any time to think about it,” he says.

  Anybody else would probably feel bad for the bastard but my head is throbbing. “You couldn’t buy your way out of it?” I barely get the words out, my throat is so dry.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “People from the Northside get out of everything.” I see the pain in his look at me. Like I’m offending him. Like he knows I think he’s a total piece of shit. The words come out a little easier now. “Throw some cash her way to get rid of it. Or she probably wouldn’t do that, so your dad would probably give you a house and some office job somewhere. If I got a chick pregnant she’d be living in my trailer with me and my mom and I’d be working double shifts at the liquor store. Maybe that’s why she stuck with you.”

  “What, instead of going out with you? Because I could provide for her and you can’t?” He tries to turn this shit back to me.

  “No. What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “She didn’t know where I was from. Or how much money my family has.”

  “Bullshit. I can tell from a mile away that you wipe your ass with dollar bills. And she could too. She was just gold digging. She probably got knocked up on purpose.”

  “No. Alicia loved me.” He whines.

  “Alicia loved me.” I mock him. “Her name was Monty.”

  “Her name is Alicia. Maybe she didn’t want me to call her Monty because there was more between us in the six months that I knew her, than there was between you two.” Kevin gets all red faced.

  “No you fucking idiot. A
licia was the name her mother gave her and she hated her mother. That’s why her real friends call her Monty. You don’t know a goddamn thing about her.”

  “I know the best thing that ever happened to her was that she stopped hanging out with you fucking losers.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. She said you were different, but I knew she was wrong. Just like the rest of the Northside, you think we’re losers. Do you know where she was the day after your party?” I can’t help myself. I beat this douchebag. My face feels like it’s about to rip apart from my grin. I’m gonna crush him right now.

  But I can’t. I can’t do it. The smile fades from my face. I head for the stairs.

  “What? Walt, you fucking loser. Where was she?”

  Shit. I stop at the door and turn back to him. “Don’t call me Walt. My friends call me that. It’s short for my last name: Walterscheid. My real name is Lloyd, you prick. Figure it out.” And I jog down the stairs.

  In the second floor hallway I hear glass breaking and loud voices coming from the first floor. I break into a run.

  --

  The buffet table is overturned. The living room is a battlefield of chicken wings and sandwich meat scatted in a pool of blood-red punch on the white carpet. Monty’s mother is on the couch crying while someone comforts her. The broken glass from the punch bowl crunches beneath my boots as I run past.

  A crowd of mourners blocks the front hall but I push through to the door. Jake and Gary are on the porch yelling at Blondie and a couple of his friends. The wind blows the rain onto the porch. Jake sees me emerge through the crowd and he smiles. He knows the odds are even now.

  He shoves Blondie hard in the chest forcing Kevin’s friend to slip on the wet planks and fall into the porch swing. Blondie regains his balance and shoves Jake back, but Jake was ready for it. I’ve seen him do that to start a hundred fights. As soon as Blondie shoves him Jake buries his fist into Blondie’s gut. He doubles over instantly and drops to his knees.

  Blondie’s two friends rush Jake and the three of them tumble off the porch into the front yard. Gary jumps off the porch and joins the fray in the mud.

  “Why don’t you just get the fuck out of here!” I hear Kevin’s voice above the wind and turn to face him.

  “You and your asshole friends need—” He doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence.

  My hand is swinging before I realize it. The unopened can of beer, still clutched tightly in my fist, smashes into the side of Kevin’s face. The can explodes in a mushroom cloud of beer, foam and blood.

  Everyone stops and stares. Jake, Gary and Kevin’s friends, covered in mud, stop and stare. Blondie stops gasping and stares. I can feel the eyes of the people behind me staring.

  Kevin slumps. His weight drops and his crutches catch him under his armpits. His eyes roll back and he teeters for a moment, balancing on the two sticks holding him up. Then he sways forward landing face first on the porch steps.

  “Holy shit!” Jake yells and chaos erupts.

  I jump down the steps, clearing Kevin’s prone body. Jake drives his knee into his opponents face and Gary smashes his enemy with a fist straight to the nose. They’re both on their feet running with me through the mud and rain to Jake’s car.

  Gary hops in the back seat. I take shotgun. Jake floors it and we get the fuck out of there.

  --

  “Dude, that fuckin’ blond guy dropped like a bitch!” Jake says still pumped up on adrenalin. His hand on the gearshift is shaking as we make our way back to The Southside.

  “No shit.” Gary says in agreement.

  “I woulda like to get a few more shots in though. What a pussy.”

  “Hey Walt, you really fucked that guy up.” Gary says from the backseat.

  “Yeah no shit. I didn’t think you had it in ya.” Jake sounds proud of me, but it barely registers.

  “Huh?”

  “You were gone for so long I thought you were making friends with that prick. What’s that?” Jake asks about the picture in my hand.

  “A picture.” I turn the picture of me and Monty over, on the back she had written: Walt, I need to talk to you. About California. I’m sorry. Love Monty

  “He killed her.” I barely hear the words myself.

  “What?” Gary speaks up from the backseat.

  “You need to get over it man. She’s gone. Just get on with your life.” Jake says.

  “Yeah.” I open the door of the moving car. “Let me out. Pull over.”

  “What the fuck!” Jake yells, slamming on the brakes. We skid onto the shoulder of the road.

  I step out of the car before it stops.

  “What the fuck dude? It’s raining.” Jake says.

  “I don’t care.”

  Gary climbs out of the back seat. “Are you sure you wanna walk?”

  “She was pregnant.” I tell him, because I need to tell someone.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “It was my kid.” I don’t know if I’m telling him or me.

  “It what? You? What? Oh fuck.” Gary doubles over. He looks like he’s gonna puke.

  “Dude get in the fucking car. Leave this lame-o” Jake yells at him.

  “It was his kid. Oh fuck.” Gary strains and can’t get himself upright.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? Get in the fucking car.”

  “You fuckin’ killed his kid.” Gary wheezes.

  “What?” I’m not sure I heard Gary right.

  “Mother fucker.” Jake grumbles and launches himself out of the car.

  “We were there when they crashed. Oh fuck Walt. Jake didn’t mean it.” Gary is leaning on my shoulder for support during his confession.

  “What?”

  “Shut the fuck up man!” Jake screams as he rounds the front of the car.

  “It was a fuckin’ accident. Jake was just fuckin’ around. They went off the road.”

  Jake nails Gary in the face and drops him like a rock.

  “I told you to shut the fuck up!” Jake screams, kicking his cousin in the stomach.

  I grab Jake by his jacket and slam him to the ground. He tries to get up but I drive my boot into his ribs and follow up with a fist to his face. His arms come out from under him and he drops into the mud. I jump on him and ram my knuckles into his face again. I pound him again. Then again and again and again. Blood sputters from his mouth and his nose is rearranged. Gashes in his cheeks ooze blood that flows into his hair and the mud. My flurry stops. His lips part and I see gaps where teeth used to be. I drive my fist into Jake’s face one last time for no reason other than I want to.

  Gary leans against the car holding his midsection. He knew better than to try to stop me. I leave him standing there with Jake lying in the mud, and head down the road.

  --

  The cemetery is on my left. I can’t tell if I’m on the North or South side. Leaning against the wrought iron fence, I scan the monuments scattered across the field. I guess it doesn’t matter. The picture in my hand is drenched. The colors have all run together. It’s meaningless.

  A car pulls up alongside me, and the driver rolls down the window.

  “Hey, can you tell me how to get to the highway?” He shouts from the car.

  “Where ya goin’?” I ask back.

  “California.”

  “Can I get a ride?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and get in the car. “I’m Lloyd.”