Take-Out

by Rob Hart

  “That’s it, then?”

  “Don’t miss the turn.”

  Esteban rolls to a stop. Brad says, “Pull the car up into the brush. Careful, careful. We’re a few feet from the ravine.” Esteban presses the brake, jerks the car into park. Wonders how the hell Brad is able to calculate such precise distance in the pitch black like this.

  “Let’s see if your friend Gordo came through,” Brad says.

  “He came through. The car was right where he said it would be.”

  Esteban climbs into the humid-thick night. It smells like green. Insects make insect noises in the bushes. He moves around to the trunk and pops it. A small yellow light illuminates four plastic jugs of cheap vodka, three sixteen-ounce bags of black pepper, and a maroon athletic bag.

  “No light,” Brad says.

  “Just a second.”

  Esteban pulls the pepper, vodka, and bag out of the car, placing them on the ground, and slams the trunk closed. Brad is doing something at the front of the car. There’s a click and he says, “Now push.”

  It doesn’t take much. A few feet and the car falls away from Esteban’s outstretched hands, pitching forward, crashing into the darkness. A few seconds later and it’s like there wasn’t even a car. He turns, and Brad is holding a bottle of vodka, standing under a small sign. Yellow print on French blue.

  WELCOME TO LAKE PARADOX.

  “So I guess there’s not really a lake,” Brad says.

  “What?” Esteban asks.

  Brad looks back and forth, between the sign and the items on the ground. Esteban picks up a bottle of vodka, unscrews the top, and tilts it over his head. The cool liquid stings where it hits his mouth and eyes, the burn forcing up into his sinus cavity.

  “Do you know the Ship of Theseus?” Brad asks, still holding a bottle.

  “Ship of what now?”

  “It’s a thought experiment. A paradox. You have a ship. You replace all the parts of the ship. Is it still the same ship?”

  Esteban tosses the empty jug into the ravine after the car and picks up another. “What’s the point?”

  “Our cells constantly die off, and they’re replaced by new cells.” Brad unscrews the top of the vodka, sniffs, and recoils. “When all your cells are gone and replaced, how can you be the same person? Will the dogs still be able to find us then?”

  “Hey, we have a plan,” Esteban says, dousing himself, then emptying the last of the bottle down his throat. The alcohol kicks a path to a soft spot in his brain. Ten years since he’s had a drink that wasn’t prison wine. It’s like a warm hug. “We wait for Gordo. Now, wash yourself down, hermano. We’ve got some walking to do.”

  “I’m not your brother.”

  “It’s a term of endearment. We’re going to be stuck together for a little while. Let’s at least pretend to be friends. For example, you can answer my question from earlier. How did you end up in Danny?”

  Brad shrugs. “Mistakes were made.” He pours the bottle over his head.

  Esteban gives up, tears open the first bag of pepper and dumps it into a pile on the ground, kicking at it so it mixes with the dust.

  “The vodka, I understand,” Brad says. “Why the pepper?”

  “Never seen Cool Hand Luke?”

  “Never.”

  Esteban sighs, wondering how long it will take Gordo to show up. Worried that this might be his punishment. Eternity in the woods with this weirdo.

  DAYLIGHT LIFTS A tentative eyebrow over the horizon as they reach the cabin. It’s small, built in a rush from mismatched wood. Nothing covering the door or the windows. There’s a spigot out front. Esteban gives it a pump. A weak but steady stream of water spills out.

  Inside there are two cots and a table and a stack of books and some debris from previous occupants. Their footsteps echo on the floorboards. Esteban drops the maroon bag on the closest cot and unzips it, finds a stash of granola bars and protein bars and some bottles of water. Underneath that, a plain white envelope, folded in thirds.

  Brad sits on the other cot and folds his hands. “So how long until Gordo gets here?”

  “When it’s safe, hermano,” Esteban says.

  “How long until it’s safe?”

  “No idea.”

  Brad nods. “Still no lake.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I need to sleep.”

  Brad swings his legs onto the cot, facing away from Esteban, circling his body inward like he’s trying to close up around something.

  Esteban steps outside, pulls off his top, bare-chested in the dewy morning air. He sits on the single step leading to the doorway and undoes his tan work boots, tossing them aside, his feet aching from the long trek through the woods.

  He wishes he had a cigarette. More vodka. Something to eat that wasn’t in bar form.

  A normal bunkmate.

  Esteban opens the envelope. Gordo came through. He removes the small silver crucifix and hangs it around his neck. He closes his eyes, rests his hand on it, and pictures the face of the man he killed. He says a quick prayer.

  If prison was hell, then this is purgatory. The in-between place where he’ll be purified of his sin before reaching heaven: his ex-wife’s bed and a torta from the corner deli. If the corner deli is still there.

  Something cracks to his left. A black cat with deep yellow eyes passes in front of him, regarding him like he might be a threat. Esteban reaches out his hand but the cat doesn’t come any closer.

  “Don’t worry,” he says to the cat. “We won’t be here long.”

  THE SILENCE IS the worst part. In prison, there’s always noise. Fights during the day. Someone weeping during the night. Footsteps echoing from deep within the building, bouncing off hard surfaces.

  Here, the woods are quiet. In the first few days there were insect noises, things cracking leaves and twigs in the distance, things scurrying through the brush. That seemed to fade, like the land has fallen ill, the forest clatter replaced by a faint sucking sound.

  Some days, Esteban tries to engage Brad. Ask him questions about his life before prison. Brad keeps asking about the ship. If when you replace all the parts it’s still the same ship. Some days they orbit like planets suspended in the darkness on paths that can’t cross each other.

  At least there’s the cat.

  After a week, it lets Esteban pet its matted fur.

  ESTEBAN WAKES FROM an uncomfortable sleep. In his dreams the man he killed is smiling, even though he wasn’t smiling when Esteban killed him.

  He rolls onto his side, the heat making his skin stick to the flimsy material of the cot. A toothbrush would be nice. His mouth tastes like he’s been sucking on a dead thing.

  Something feels missing. He pats himself, chest and stomach, before reaching his hand up to the empty space on his neck. The crucifix is gone.

  He sits up and Brad is perched on the edge of his own cot, in his yellowed tank top and flimsy boxers. He’s cramming a protein bar into his face and staring at Esteban with those big wet eyes.

  There are two ways to kill time in prison. Lift weights and read books. Esteban lifted. Brad read. Their skills complement each other. It also means Esteban outweighs Brad by a hundred pounds of bulk. Maybe more than that.

  And still, the way the smaller man stares unsettles Esteban’s core.

  “Last one,” Brad says, folding up the cellophane wrapper.

  Esteban checks the floor, then gets up and inspects the cot. “Have you seen my cross?”

  “Gordo better be on his way,” Brad says. “We’re covered on water but I haven’t seen any animals around here except the stray squirrel. I would say we could eat the cat but I suspect the cat is dead.”

  Esteban’s head swims. “Okay, wait. No, we’re not eating the cat. Second, have you seen my cross?”

  “The crucifix?” Brad places the folded-up piece of cellophane on his cot. “I borrowed it.”

  Heat rises to Esteban’s face. He stands, casting Brad in shadow. The small man
regards him like a vaguely interesting sculpture.

  “What the fuck do you mean?” Esteban asks.

  Brad stands and pushes past Esteban, like the bigger man might not snap his neck in this very moment. He walks to the table in the corner, to a pile of electronics that looks like something smashed with a hammer. “I found this. It’s a radio. If I can get it to work, we can listen to news reports. Some of the metal pieces are missing. I needed the silver.”

  “Give it back.”

  “You understand it’s a meaningless symbol, correct? Jesus of Nazareth was no more the son of God than…”

  Esteban pounds his fist onto the table so hard that the corner of it cracks and splinters off. “Now!”

  Brad reaches into the clutter and comes out with the crucifix.

  Esteban snatches it away and places it around his neck. “Take this again and Gordo will be picking me up alone, okay, hermano? And now what the fuck do you mean the cat is dead?”

  Brad nods his head toward a box in the corner. “It climbed in there.”

  Esteban crosses the room and looks down into the cardboard box. The cat, curled up on itself, looks up at him and purrs.

  “The cat is fine.”

  “I guess it just depends on your perspective, then,” Brad says.

  ESTEBAN STANDS AT the far wall of the cabin. He counts the marks he scratched into the wall with the rusty nail he found half buried in the dirt outside. One mark for every sunrise, twenty-two marks in total.

  Hunger has become a third person in the cabin. It looms over Esteban as he tries to sleep. Whispers in his ear as he crunches through the leaves outside the cabin.

  Sometimes it roars.

  There is plenty of water from the spigot out front. It tastes funny, like old loose change, but it’s water. The forest refuses to provide much else. Esteban has been able to catch the occasional bird or squirrel by throwing rocks. Cooked over small, brief fires, they only ever yield enough meat to make him feel hungrier.

  One day, Esteban saw a deer. He was sitting on the steps and he heard it before he saw it. The sharp crack of a stick in the distance, and he expected to look up and see a wave of police officers coming through the trees. He was almost disappointed when that’s not what he saw.

  The deer was there and then it was gone. He considered chasing it, but was afraid to stray too far from the cabin. He sharpened the end of a long branch in case the deer came back.

  Brad hasn’t been concerned about the lack of food. He’s never complained or asked for a share of Esteban’s primitive hunts. He just sits at the table, fiddling with scraps he found in the cabin and things he scavenged from the woods. Making like he’s building something, but whole days pass and nothing ends up built.

  As Esteban makes the twenty-third mark on the wall, he realizes his pants are loose, and wonders if he can find some rope to fashion into a belt.

  ESTEBAN’S STOMACH TWISTS like it’s trying to devour itself. Nerves misfire as time unravels like a ball of twine, spilling into a jumble on the floor. No longer linear, crossing over on itself.

  He wakes at the slightest noise.

  Sometimes Brad is on his cot. Sometimes he’s not.

  Sometimes they argue about Gordo.

  Sometimes he hears sirens in the distance and they turn out to be nothing.

  Sometimes he thinks of his father, sitting on the other side of the glass partition, his face collapsed like a bridge, telling him, “I did this to you.”

  Sometimes he finds Brad standing in the woods, staring into the distance, at where the world disappears beyond the trees, and he asks, “Don’t you think there should be a lake?”

  Sometimes Esteban thinks about ships. Which makes him think of himself as a ship. If all his parts are new, cells and hair and skin replaced in the years since, is he still the same man who pulled that trigger?

  Mostly, Esteban sits on the step of the cabin and looks out on the forest and waits for Gordo and wishes he had something to eat.

  ESTEBAN COLLAPSES TO the floor, pain gushing through him like water. He rolls onto his side. Exhausted, starving, he surrenders to the pain.

  When he’s able to pull his brain out of the mud, he works himself into a sitting position, his hands tied behind his back. He flexes his arms but the bindings don’t budge. A bloodied stick as thick as his forearm rests on the floor next to him.

  Brad is sitting at the table, in only his boxers, even though the air has turned to chill at night, poking at the innards of the gutted radio with a stick. The room smells of metal and feces.

  Esteban looks the wall and sees the cat nailed into place, limbs pointed in odd directions, gutted from chin to groin. Dark brown blood caked and smeared on the wall, like a child gone crazy with finger-paint.

  His first thought is: now he is alone.

  His second: where the hell did Brad get the other nails?

  “I told you the cat was dead,” Brad said. “You shouldn’t have looked in the box.”

  Esteban struggles to form words. They’re like raw dough in his mouth. “What…why…”

  “The radio,” Brad says, not looking up from his project. “I thought I would be able to communicate with Gordo. Find out where he is. Or maybe find out where the police are focusing their search. And then this happened.”

  He turns a dial on the broken face of the radio and cocks an ear to it. His wet eyes so wide they look ready to fall out of his head. There’s nothing but silence.

  “Don’t you hear that?” Brad asks.

  “Hear…what?”

  “They’ve already caught us! At first I thought it was a ploy to make us feel safe. And then I heard you, your voice.” He jabs the stick at Esteban. “You ran, and you lead them right to us. Gordo never showed. Do you need me to turn it up?”

  Esteban looks around the room for some sort of weapon.

  “That’s why you’re tied up,” Brad says. “Don’t you understand?” He leaps to his feet. His slight body towering over Esteban. Clutched in his hand, so tight the skin is taught and white, is a rusty hunting knife. An antique with a wooden handle given way to rot, the blade blunted nearly flat on the edge.

  That poor cat.

  “Look. I know Gordo will be here. Just untie me…”

  “Do you know what prison is?”

  Esteban shakes his head.

  “It’s a box,” Brad says, pacing toward the cat, then away. “You go into it and you’re both alive and dead. Alive inside but dead to the world outside. We left and we were alive and we came here and we died. I can’t figure out if this is our fate or if there’s a way to change it.”

  “Listen…”

  Brad spins, holds the knife toward Esteban. “Do not speak. You couldn’t possibly hope to understand this.”

  Esteban nods again. Realizes there’s only one way out. Going back to prison has to be better than dying. Maybe going back is the thing he deserves.

  Brad paces the room, between the cat and the radio, examining the innards of both. Occasionally, he pauses, listens to the silence, and says, “I love this song.”

  Esteban realizes his mistake: the pills. Brad used to take pills. Every day, delivered in a small paper cup by the hacks. Weeks out here and the medication cleared through his system. The broken part of his brain is back in control.

  Esteban curses himself. He should have seen it. Should have asked Gordo for meds.

  Brad sighs. “I think I need to sleep. You need to stay there. If you leave, if someone sees you, then you may very well kill us both. Do you understand?”

  “Can I have some water?” Esteban asks.

  “In the morning.”

  “Please. Just a sip. Something to hold me over.”

  Brad stares at the knife, considering the request or something else, Esteban isn’t sure. Finally, he nods, picks an empty bottle off the table, and steps outside to the spigot. Esteban braces himself, and when Brad reappears, throws his foot out.

  It catches Brad in the knee. There’s a cru
nching sound, like a handful of dry spaghetti cracked in half, and the small man tumbles to the ground. Esteban lifts his right foot up as high as he can and brings it down onto Brad’s forehead. Another crunch. This one deeper.

  He climbs to his feet, reaches back, and slams his bound wrists against his ass.

  Once, twice, three times. On the fourth blow, the ropes binding him snap.

  Esteban picks up the knife and drops to a knee, turns Brad over.

  Brad looks up at him with sad, pleading eyes, blood spilling from a gash on his forehead. Esteban holds up the knife. Not wanting to be that man, but also not wanting this man to kill him.

  Maybe with his parts replaced he’s no longer a killer?

  Brad pushes, trying to get up, and he’s strong. So much stronger than Esteban would have expected. It scares him, so Esteban pushes the knife in under Brad’s chin, pressing his weight into it until it catches on the hard wood floor. Blood erupts from Brad’s throat and forms bubbles on the corners of his mouth.

  Esteban climbs to his feet and runs out the door, crashing through the woods, falling forward through the darkness.

  HOURS LATER, OR maybe just minutes later, he’s not even sure anymore, Esteban sees something ahead. A thing somewhere between light and movement, off beyond the trees. He walks toward it. Slow enough to be safe but fast enough to outrace the apprehension.

  He thinks of the man he killed. The first one. He was sitting on a park bench. He was a man who did something another man didn’t like, and Esteban was tasked to kill him. He can remember the dead man’s face, but not the transgression that put them on a collision course.

  When Esteban held up the gun, the man’s face twisted in anger.

  Not fear or regret. Anger.

  Esteban looks at his blood-soaked hands. His head spinning from hunger. Even with his parts replaced he is not any different. The ship is still the same ship.

  He reaches the clearing and before him sits the cabin.

  He stares at it, his hands cold where they’re wet. It has to be a different cabin.