Wick - The Omnibus Edition

by Bunker, Michael

  He heard the gas cans slosh behind him as the pickup rattled to a shuddering halt. Sheesh! He ducked his head down and held his breath, cringing. He’d heard of static electricity building up in gas cans that are not grounded, then blowing up like a bomb. He sniffed the air for any smell of leaked gas as he got out of the car and ran around to the front. He smelled no leaks and bent down to inspect the items in the road. Two bikes, with some bags strapped to them. Stepping out, he gathered both bikes and threw them into the back of his truck bed, moving deftly and staying low around the truck. He didn’t know exactly why he was doing it, but it felt right, and he didn’t argue with himself. He worked quickly and instinctively, without a plan other than to help. He swung around the door and jumped into the cab and realized that he had not turned off his lights on approach.

  ****

  Some of the men who’d been fighting with the yellow suits, the ones in motley military uniforms, were now coming towards him. They were shouting at him and waving their arms. Calvin could not make out what they were shouting but he did not need to.

  He inched the vehicle forward, as if he were pulling up to ask directions. As if he were just some guy out on a Sunday drive and he’d taken a wrong turn. He came upon the first of the men, and he punched the truck forward. He pushed at the horn but with no effect. He was just ad-libbing now, an actor on the stage who didn’t know his lines. He just did what felt right.

  He swerved this way and that as the thugs tried to run along beside him and reach into the cab. He swerved into the snow embankments on the sides of the road, spinning the wheel and the truck to shake the men off, and he just kept driving. The men in the uniforms up ahead, the ones fighting with the yellow suits, stopped and gawked at the spectacle. Everyone stopped for a moment as Calvin broke free and drove like a maniac toward the yellow suits and toward the uniforms.

  ****

  There was a moment when, in the headlights of the pickup, Calvin saw in the eyes of the uniformed bandits that they thought they might intimidate him. They raised their guns and pointed them directly at his head. They stood in the roadway as if they thought that would stop him. They thought that it would stop anyone. They can’t be blamed much. It is in the nature of things. The guards were simply not accustomed to dealing with people who did not understand the underlying force implied in such situations. They lived, unconsciously, by the Maoist doctrine that truth was found in the barrel of a gun, and they were not accustomed to coming across people who were not familiar with such a philosophy. The guards weren’t normally challenged in such a manner. But it didn’t take them long to figure out that they didn’t like it.

  They stood in the roadway with their guns pointed at Calvin’s head, and they wondered whether the driver of the approaching pickup knew just who they were. Did he know exactly who he was dealing with?

  The answer to that question, had they bothered to actually ask it, would have been “Yes.”

  But that wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was not that Calvin did not know who the men in the road were, or that he did not see their guns, or that he did not assess the danger. Rather, it was exactly the opposite. The problem was that the soldiers in the road, pointing at him with their guns, thinking that threats were all that needed to be said on the matter, did not know Calvin Rhodes.

  The light of the headlamps bore down upon the guards and they scattered like cockroaches before it. One of the rear guards held his ground though. As the guard sighted down his gun to shoot though the windshield, Calvin leaned slightly to his left, and then turned his head towards the side glass. He prayed.

  As the bullet ripped through the windshield, and the cab, and then the back glass, missing Calvin’s head by inches, he slammed on the brakes and the truck slipped sideways and struck the gunman with the passenger-side rear fender back by the bed. Calvin thought, that guy ain’t gonna make it, and then he accelerated again, streaming by the other bandits, heading towards the yellow suits.

  Calvin came upon the yellow suits as if in slow motion, and they looked like aliens, these people, in their hoods and breathing apparatus. They leaned toward his pickup, in the ball of light created by the ancient headlamps, and held up hands as if in supplication. Their bright yellow suits were set in contrast with the red of the truck, the green of the tarp, the white of the snow.

  Calvin leaned over to look into the framing of his pickup truck’s window. The taller suit leaned in to stare at him as he passed. A face in a window. The truck paused.

  Time itself paused. It was a woman’s face, looking out the plastic window of the hazmat helmet. Her breath momentarily, just for a micro-second, fogged up the shield of her helmet as he passed by, but then it cleared. Her startled visage was luminous in the nighttime glow. Not even for a moment did she look frightened. But she looked at Calvin, and he noticed it. And she mouthed the words…

  Help Us.

  ****

  Get In! He mouthed the words back at her. He pointed to the back of the pickup. The two yellow suits put their weight on the running boards and pushed their way up onto the bed, even as Calvin peeled out along the highway. He punched the gas and shifted gears, and they were almost fifty yards away before the bullets began to rain down on them. The shots, thankfully, were not very accurate. He was half a mile away before the sounds of gunfire faded into the night and were masked by the crunching of the tires on the road and the cold wind knifing through the bullet hole in the windscreen.

  He’d learned from his recent mistakes, and, after the two yellow suits had piled into the bed of the truck, he’d flipped the headlights off. It’s hard to hit what you cannot see, his father had told him. But now he was driving blindly through the night, and he tried his best to use the glow of the stars in the nighttime sky to drive by, watching intently for the faint reflection from the road that disappeared near its edges.

  He drove unconsciously, and couldn’t have told you if you’d asked just how long his mind was frozen in the shock of the moment.

  Kerthump.

  Calvin heard it, but it didn’t really register. Then it came again and again.

  Kerthumkerthumpkerthump… kerthump!

  He struggled to hold the wheel on the road, and as he gripped the wheel in a white-knuckled embrace, he became aware of the knocking on the window behind his head. The car rumbled and shook. The drive shaft shook too as he fought to keep control. He glanced at the gauges. He’d been doing sixty-something in the dark. Maybe more. Adrenaline exploded through his mind and body. The truck slowed to almost nothing, and the sound of muffled screams through the busted window behind his head. It was timed with the pounding of a fist on the cab top.

  ****

  Calvin had driven into a ditch. He was riding on four flats tires. Blowouts, he thought, On all four, and all at once! He’d been blessed that the truck hadn’t overturned… blessed to be alive.

  He sniffed the air and jumped out of the cab. Again, no fumes. Calvin gave a little hop to look over the truck bed, where he saw a tangle of tarp and bikes and cans… and yellow hazmat suits. He looked in at the wriggling bodies inside the suits. The tallest of the them eventually righted itself and reached up to unbuckle its hood. It was the woman. The face in the window. The shorter suit was a boy, obviously her son. The resemblance was clear. They were beautiful, the two of them. Calvin smiled.

  “Sorry about the ride.”

  “What?! Are you trying to kill us der, boy?”

  Calvin looked at the woman, and then she smiled at him. It was all the thanks he needed, her smile. There was something poetic in it, the same quality that made people stand in front of the Mona Lisa and stare.

  ****

  Stephen looked at his mother. He’d noticed that her accent was coming out with the stress of the travel. He looked at the guy who had just saved them, and they both broke into a grin. Stephen jabbed his mom in the ribs. “Kill us der… Mom? Der? Really?”

  Stephen smiled at Calvin again and nodded his head to the
older youth. He did it in a way that said Hey, nice rescue and stuff. Calvin looked at the two of them, these yellow suits, whom he’d just rescued from a gunfight in a snowfield… and he screwed up his face. It should have been an awkward moment, but it wasn’t.

  He looked at them with his most inquisitive look… and asked, “Hey… got anything to eat?”

  ****

  “You looked like those guys on Breaking Bad,” Calvin said. There he was again, referring to a television show. The two of them just laughed.

  “Yeah, I guess we did,” Stephen answered. “Good thing, too. I was about to go all Heisenberg on them.” Calvin and Stephen laughed again. They were sitting with their backs against the truck while Veronica scouted out an area to see if she could find some little nook or cranny where they might hide throughout the night.

  “We’ll attend to the vehicle in the morning,” she said. And then she’d gone to scout.

  She’d only been gone fifteen minutes, and the two teens were already talking like old friends, remembering what that other world was like, as if it weren’t really gone.

  “Dude… did you see that one show that was going to come out on F/X?” Stephen paused. That was one way to tell that the boys were beginning to reckon with the new world. They’d begun to talk about the old life in tenses that showed they’d once thought for a moment that it might return, but now they no longer did.

  “Yeah … that show that was gonna be about Russian spies in America? What was it gonna to be called?”

  “Oh yeahyeahyeah. That one from the Cold War, with Reagan and Michael Jackson and stuff. Ummm, The Americans?” Stephen said, nodding his head. “I saw the preview. It looked like it was going to be good.”

  “Dude, that chick on that show was hot,” Calvin said, looking at Stephen and smiling. “She looked like she could kick some butt.”

  “Yeah,” Stephen said. He smiled and thought of a girl in a bodega in that other world. “I’d betray my country for a chick like that.”

  “Yeah… a chick like that, or…” Calvin made a little mock motion of sniffing the air, “some French fries.”

  Veronica could hear their guffaws from several hundred yards away as she walked toward them in silence through the night.

  ****

  Veronica stayed up through the night, watching. She had her pistol and she hoped she’d never be forced to use it. They’d walked a good quarter-mile into the forest before bedding down for the night. Stephen and Calvin slept in fits and starts. Before morning broke, she roused them, and they put on their clothes while she put out some food for them. She hummed a song under her breath, and occasionally she’d break out into a small bit of lyric. She sang the line in its lilting, sing-song herkyjerkyness. She swung her head to the side when she did it, her long ropy braids whipping over her shoulder. Then she stopped, and caught herself. She’d thought she was humming under her breath, but she’d actually sung out loud. She stopped, and the boys looked at her. She was caught like a deer in the headlights.

  “What’s that song, Mrs. D?” Calvin was already fitting in the way that kids like Calvin do, seamlessly. He was already calling her “Mrs. D.” He looked at her, expectantly.

  “Oh, just a song that I was listening to before,” Veronica said. As she did so, she waved out into the nothingness, as if to say all this. Stephen rolled his eyes. “Oh, again, with the Clay stuff.” Veronica cut him a sharp glance. It was clear that whatever “the Clay stuff” was had been a topic of some conversation between them. Calvin looked at them both, wondering what he’d stepped into.

  “There was this guy that came by our house during the storm.” Stephen indicated with his hand somewhere back there. “He was cool. He and my mom connected. They listened to this group called the Mountain Goats, and…,” He rolled his eyes at his mom.

  “What? It’s a good song,” Veronica said.

  “I agree,” Calvin said. Stephen looked at him sideways like a sibling who realizes he has competition. Stephen made a mock look of pain.

  “No, really. They’re cool,” Calvin said. “I mean, I haven’t heard the new new stuff, but they are always good.” Stephen stepped back as if to say You’re killing me.

  Veronica laughed at their antics. “The thing that really bothers Stephen about the Clay situation,” Veronica said, nodding her head to Stephen as if they’d had this conversation before, “I may have overstepped my bounds when the man stayed with us. I took some poems of his and had them bound without his permission. Stephen thought that what I did was a horrible breach of privacy. But I couldn’t help myself.” She looked at Stephen and he looked at Calvin. “Well, some of them were…” she searched through the air to find the word, “…lovely.”

  They were walking low along a hedge at the edge of a paddock, keeping their eyes peeled across the pristine field of white. The boys could tell that she was bound to go on and so they let her.

  “There was this one poem that described a Van Gogh painting. And I loveVan Gogh. It was partly him who inspired me to paint! Anyway, the poem described the lush fields and broken doors on their hinges, and the sea, and the sea of faces that are found in his paintings. But it was more than just about the color. It was also about the loneliness of being Van Gogh, in his brilliance, and his madness. We almost never knew him, you know? It was only through the support and the promotion of his brother that he became well-known. Otherwise, he was an outcast. In Gauguin, he had a friend who seemed to understand him, but Gauguin was always promising to come and see him. He rarely did.”

  Veronica and the boys walked circumspectly as they talked. She indicated to the wider world with her hand, the white of the field, the hint of blue invading the gray of the morning sky. “Anyway,” she said, “it was a lovely poem.”

  With that, Calvin, Stephen, and Veronica found themselves standing at the back bumper of the rusted red pickup truck in the brown-white slush of the accident. “It was a nail strip,” Veronica told them. “I found it last night when I was out on patrol. Whoever put it there will be around soon enough to check it. We have to work quickly.”

  Standing in the thin blue light of morning, their breath rose up before them. It rose in little puffs against the coldness of the air.

  From the Poems of C.L. Richter

  A question

  And what is to stop a Van Gogh –

  Weary from too many Arlesienne nights lost in a haze of whores and absinthe,

  Mad from waiting for a Gauguin, who never comes, to come –

  From getting up from his makeshift bed, loose-joined planks creaking under the weight of his rising shift, tangled sheets clamoring, twisting underneath him, stretching out their gnarled arms to hold down his gaunt form,

  From dressing in his threadbare clothes, simple sepia-toned, basket-woven fabrics, dried on a hook, stiffened, still-containing smells of flesh, earth and sea-breeze,

  From running his thin, rangy hands across his haggard face, five days growth of shocking redorange beard skeining through his fingertips, rioting against the calm in the browns of his shirt, the blues of the walls, his own fleshy tones,

  From binding up his canvases, hands stippled with spikes of pure color, soft as leather, strong like wire, and lacing the binding under his arm, his ragged hat cocked slightly on his head, pulled over one ear, shading light over one eye,

  From walking out of his cottage, down the pebbled pathway, redbrown door swinging slightly ajar, quivering uncertainly in the thin morning light,

  From walking along a broken trail and, at its end, across a golden field,

  autumn grass bending in a breezy sway, nodding toward a still further field where sunflowers rise like soldiers, their sharp sentry eyes scanning the surrounding hills, warily watching a row of greenbrown olive trees congregating at the edge of the plowline, their smaller hedges rising up like smoke in wispy branches,

  From traversing the field in sharp diagonal lines that lengthen out and flatten as the hills give way to coastline and miles of organic b
iomass teeming in a salty, towing surf, heard before it can be seen, smelled before it can be heard,

  From finding a small yellowblue dinghy tied along the greengrey waterline and fashioning a makeshift sail out of stitched-together canvases, hoisted up the boom and creaking against the rigging as they unfurl and expand to reveal radiant flowers, swirling firmament, and boldly textured faces in the shimmering sunlight,

  And from loosening the mooring, leaning his weight into the pull of the halyards, and setting off towards the distant horizon, where line and form are one?

  CHAPTER 32

  The shot and the echo of the shot rang out across the little clearing and bounced up into the trees and then the sky.

  Peter turned and saw the man on horseback, his arm raised, holding a rifle at a right angle to his body. His brain at first refused to believe the information being transported to it by his sleepy eyes. A warning shot. The man brought down the rifle and aimed straight at Peter. He wouldn’t warn again. His uniform was that of the Missouri National Guard.

  Peter understood enough of what was occurring to know that he should not raise his own rifle. He put his hands in the air, and from around him appeared other soldiers who swooped down on him like hawks. They disarmed him and pulled his hands behind his back.

  The man on the horse, the one with the rifle, was lecturing him about the new laws. Specifically, the man was telling him that it was a death penalty offense to be carrying a weapon of any kind. The officer droned on for a moment, the horse turning from side to side, as Peter was led to a tree at the edge of the clearing. It took the entirety of this time for Peter to become cogent enough to understand that he was not in a dream.