Pistol Poets

by Victor Gischler

  Then gravity.

  The long, awkward plummet.

  It wasn’t more than twelve feet down to the water, but the Mercedes in freefall took a lifetime to plunge the distance. It smacked the water, the impact throwing Morgan against the windshield. He bounced back into the seat. A blur of water and darkness and dashboard lights. The windshield looked down into the depths, the remaining headlight flailing against the black of the Gulf.

  Chilling panic. Morgan saw himself going down with the car, pictured the salty water rising over his head, his lungs burning for air. A strangled cry of fear, desperate. It had come out of his own mouth.

  He clawed at the automatic windows, lowered the one on the driver’s side. The Gulf poured in. But the water came slowly. The Mercedes floated near the level of the lapping waves. The hood of the car tilted down into the water, but the rear remained above the surface.

  Morgan scrambled through the window.

  “Morgan!” Anger, panic, rage mixed in Stubbs’s voice. “God-damn you. Come back here, Morgan. I’m stuck. Morgan!”

  Morgan paid no attention. Stubbs continued to scream after him.

  Morgan squirmed through the window, bobbed on the freezing water. Went under, swallowed water, kicked to the surface, and coughed. Gulped for air. The shore was a smear of fuzzy light. It seemed about two hundred miles away. Muffled screams still came out of the Mercedes.

  Morgan kicked toward shore. He wasn’t a strong swimmer. Water smacked his face, stung his eyes. He sputtered, stroked. His arms ached with exertion and cold. He was going numb, shivering.

  Morgan felt the bottom sooner than he’d expected, stood in the waist-deep water, and trudged to land. Waves pushed him in the right direction. He made it to the beach, collapsed into the sand, chest heaving with burning breaths.

  He propped himself up on an elbow, looked back toward the end of the pier. For a second he thought the Mercedes had gone down, the black against the night made it hard to spot. But there it was, the back end still visible, taillights like the eyes of a demon.

  Morgan watched. The Mercedes bobbed. It looked to Morgan like the front bumper was bouncing against the sandy bottom. It was pretty shallow, even that far out. Each time it bobbed, more water poured through the open front window, the tide inching it farther out and away from the pier. The car was sinking slowly, and he hadn’t seen Deke get out.

  Morgan watched, still gasping breath, as the Gulf of Mexico slowly ate Dirk Jakes’s new Mercedes.

  The son of a bitch had left him. Stubbs had threatened, begged, screamed his throat raw, but Morgan didn’t come back.

  When Morgan had taken the Mercedes airborne, Stubbs had lost himself. He’d floated, turned, the night sky a tumbling blur. The whole car had shuddered with the impact of water. Stubbs had hit the floor, his hands flying out to protect him.

  His left hand had slid under the car seat in front of him. He heard a crack. Something had come apart under the seat. His fingers had wedged between the metal tracks just as the seat had suddenly shifted backward. His four fingers had been crushed, trapped, pain lancing past his elbow, up to the shoulder.

  He’d screamed for Morgan to come back.

  Now he pulled hard on his hand. If he could, he’d yank the fingers out of their sockets. He couldn’t see the hand, but he knew it was ruined. The water was up to his neck. The pain was nothing compared to the water’s relentless rise. Stubbs did not want to drown helpless in the dark. He gritted his teeth, pulled, grunted. He felt the skin of his fingers rip and pull away along the bone.

  And the cold water still came.

  “Oh, God.” Stubbs thrashed, tried to work the fingers loose. “Oh, God, please.” His free hand groped, tried to find leverage, anything to help get free. His hand landed on the tools. A hammer, some chisels.

  A saw.

  The water was halfway over Stubbs’s Adam’s apple. He stretched, craned his neck, gulped air. “Please, God.” He grabbed the saw, held it tight. Tears stung his eyes. “Please.” He lifted his head for another lungful of air, the water level hovering at his bottom lip.

  He put the saw against his arm just above the wrist. The back of the seat kept him from going lower. Stubbs was already halfway through the bone when it occurred to him it might have been easier if he had just put the.45 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The dark waters closed over him, the Mercedes gently bouncing against the sandy bottom, tiptoeing out to sea.

  Part 4

  thirty-four

  Moses Duncan unlocked the door to his dark little farmhouse, Eddie right behind him. He was tired and pissed and cold and hungry. He felt for the light switch.

  Then the hands.

  They grabbed him from all directions; Eddie too. Moses tried to twist away and earned a fist on the side of the head.

  A voice. “Be still, bitch.”

  He was thrown to the floor, facedown. A kick in the ribs. Moses whuffed air, heard Eddie mumble fear noises. Somebody turned on the lights.

  “Damn,” Moses shouted. “Take what you want.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Another kick, but halfhearted this time.

  A black man in a purple suit knelt in front of Moses. He grinned, no humor touching his eyes. Moses felt hands and feet along his body, keeping him pinned down. He wouldn’t have tried to move anyway. He froze, kept his mouth shut, waited to be told what to do.

  “They call me Red Zach. You heard of me?”

  “No, sir,” Moses said. He chanced a look, swiveled his eyes around the room. A bunch of coons. Hell. Just his luck. Some kind of damn poetic justice maybe to die in the hands of a mob of coons. Maybe they were with that Ellis son of a bitch. Maybe they knew Moses had been looking to splatter some buckshot across Ellis’s face, and these coons were here to kill him.

  No, that didn’t make sense. Ellis was hanging with those two white guys. The mob in his living room was strictly an all-coon outfit. Hell and shit.

  “Well, you going to hear a lot more about me real soon,” Zach said. “As a matter of fact, we’re going to get acquainted because you work for me now.”

  Moses opened his mouth to protest, but a heavy hand on the back of his head pushed him down. Moses kissed the floor, bumped his front teeth against his upper lip. A trickle of blood.

  “Think of this like a hostile corporate takeover,” Zach said. “Just how hostile is up to you, but maybe you should consider the perks.”

  Moses Duncan was not going to work for no goddamn nigger coon in a purple pimp suit. Daddy would roll in his grave. But he shut up and kept his ears open.

  Someone dropped a bag next to his head, a suitcase. He looked at it from the corner of his eye. It was his, the one he used to stash his merchandise. They must’ve gone through the whole house. Maybe even found the sawed-off, single-shot.410 he kept duct-taped to the back of the toilet in case somebody came at him when he was on the crapper.

  “The bad news,” Zach told him, “is that your freelance days are over. You answer to Red Zach now. That piss you off? I see it in your eyes. Don’t try to hide it. Good. I’m glad. I don’t want no cunts working for me. But I don’t want no fools either. You play it smart and it works out for everybody. You hear what I’m saying?”

  Moses thought a second before answering. “I hear you.”

  “Good,” Zach said. “Now here’s the part maybe you’ll like. Once you start working for me, you going to do a lot more business than what you got in your little suitcase here. We going to talk about some real greenbacks. You got a college town here. Ripe. I’ll show you how to work it. Somebody else starts poaching your territory, I send my boys down, stomp it out quicker than a forest fire. You see the potential?”

  Moses said that he saw.

  “You got any objections?” Zach asked. “Can you see any reason this business arrangement won’t be mutually beneficial?”

  The hand on the back of his neck tightened just slightly.

  “Sounds like a good deal to me,” Moses said.

 
“Excellent. What happened to that guy’s face?”

  It took Moses a second to understand he’d meant Eddie. “Glass. Cut him all up.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can I get up now?” asked Moses.

  “Nope. We got just one more thing to talk about first.”

  “Okay.”

  Zach softened his voice, friendly, put his hand on Moses’s shoulder. “I think a brother maybe came to you recently with a big score. A shitload of premium coke. Why don’t you tell me all about it. Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”

  thirty-five

  Don’t you ever go stir-crazy in here, man? Don’t you ever want to stick a gun in your mouth and blast your fucking brains out?” Jenks asked.

  Tad Valentine scratched his wild, white beard and considered the question. This Sherman Ellis/Harold Jenks person obviously didn’t like being cooped up. He’d offered him the pick of his library, had even suggested some Langston Hughes or Etheridge Knight that Valentine mistakenly believed would appeal to Ellis/Jenks’s ethnicity.

  But the young man had instead latched on to a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. The novel’s nonstop atrocity fest seemed to hold a special horrified fascination for him. Jenks frequently consulted a Webster’s Dictionary between chapters. Valentine decided-not for the first time-that he was simply not in tune with the multicultural complexities of today’s youth. Ellis/Jenks puzzled him not only for being black, but for being young and part of a world that did not need or want men like Valentine. They wanted MTV and PlayStation and the Internet and soft drink commercials with half-naked teenagers and many other things that scared the hell out of Valentine.

  And this young black man made him nervous, on the lam and in some kind of peril from what Valentine could gather. It wasn’t that he disliked Ellis/Jenks. But the kid was a bold symbol of everything out there, and now he wanted to hide in here. Valentine worried Ellis/Jenks would bring the world and its troubles with him.

  And just what the hell was the kid’s name anyway? Sherman Ellis or Harold Jenks. It seemed there was a halfhearted effort under way to conceal the man’s identity. Wayne DelPrego had started with Sherman Ellis and had gradually abandoned it for Harold Jenks.

  Valentine had decided to think of the black kid as Sharold Jenkis. It seemed a reasonable compromise.

  “Sometimes,” Valentine said.

  Jenks looked up from The Painted Bird. “What?” He’d forgotten that he’d asked Valentine a question.

  “Sometimes,” Valentine repeated, “I think about putting a gun in my mouth. But it’s not because I’m cooped up as you say. It’s the thought of going out there.” He pointed at the rest of the world through the dirty window. The glass was badly smudged.

  Jenks looked out the window. “It’s just a parking lot.”

  “Hmmmm, yes. Where’s Mr. DelPrego today?”

  “Snuck out,” Jenks said. “He’s stir-crazy too.”

  “It wouldn’t fit anyway,” Valentine said.

  “Say what?”

  “The gun. I couldn’t get it into my mouth.” Valentine went to the other window, the big one. A thinly padded bench ran the length beneath it. He flipped the lid, hinges squealing, and pulled out three and a half feet of something wrapped in cloth. He lowered the bench lid again and set the bundle on top, peeled away the cloth slowly, and revealed a long, double-barreled shotgun.

  “It’s a twenty-gauge,” Valentine said. “I wouldn’t be able to reach the trigger.”

  Jenks set the book aside, came over to look at it. “It’s pretty.”

  “My father gave it to me as a graduation present. We hunted duck quite often before I went off to New Haven.” He picked up the shotgun, cradled it lovingly, broke it in half, and looked down each barrel. “Still clean.”

  The darkly polished wood gleamed, ornate silver scrollwork. An expensive firearm. Valentine had not held the weapon in over a year. The cold metal in his hand sparked a memory. A duck blind before dawn, the sun rising pink-orange over the lake. The last morning they’d gone hunting before Valentine had left for the East. His father had wanted him to be an engineer. Oklahoma oil had paid for the shotgun, the private lake, Valentine’s education. Father had been bitterly disappointed when his son turned poet. Poet. The word had struck his father like a tomahawk between the eyes. Poet was code for communist-faggot-slacker to an Oklahoma oil man. His father had died before the Pulitzer Prize, before the New York Times interview, before everything.

  Jenks took the gun from his hand. “Cool. Let me see.”

  Valentine let go reluctantly, watched Jenks sight along the barrel.

  “What you shoot with this?”

  “Ducks,” Valentine said. “Or geese.”

  “What you use?” asked Jenks. “Slugs?”

  “If you want to scatter the bird across the county.”

  Jenks’s eyes shifted back to the bench seat. “Any shells in there?”

  Valentine followed Jenks’s gaze to the bench seat. He looked back at Jenks and said, “I’ve made it a point not to pry into your business.”

  “Good.”

  “But maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on, eh? Perhaps I could even help.”

  Jenks bit the end of his thumb, looked out the window. After a long pause, he shook his head. “I think you’d rather not know.”

  Valentine lifted an eyebrow.

  “But I appreciate it,” Jenks said. “Thanks for letting me and Wayne crash here. And thanks for trying to show me about the books, letting me look at Painted Bird. It’s wasted on me but thanks for trying.”

  “Education is never a waste on anyone,” Valentine said.

  Jenks smiled, shrugged. “Okay, man. Sure.”

  Valentine nodded. He was a patient man. Perhaps he could pry some information out of DelPrego upon his return.

  Wayne DelPrego left campus at a fast walk, looking over his shoulder as he slunk back into the knot of woods that bordered Eastern Oklahoma University. He didn’t venture deeply, not like when he and Jenks had hidden from Red Zach’s crew. He skirted the edge, stopped and knelt in a thick patch of shrubs when he saw his trailer.

  He watched.

  Be damned if these gangster shitbags would run him out of his home. He’d been wearing the same clothes-same underwear-for three days. And he wanted his truck. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.

  Watching the back of the trailer didn’t show him anything. Jenks was sure they’d watch the place, but how? Sit in a car on the street, or would somebody wait in the trailer for him with a loaded gun and the lights out? Or both? Maybe this was a mistake. He’d mentioned to Jenks he might try to sneak back for his truck, but Jenks had put his foot down. He’d said just to grab the cocaine and get back quick.

  Fuck it.

  DelPrego bolted from the shrubs, sprinted, his breaths huffing little clouds into the cold air. He dove under one of the trailer windows, pressed his back against the half-rusted wall. He listened.

  Nothing.

  He thought about crawling through the gap in the aluminum skirting and getting under the trailer, but shivered at the thought of what might be under there. Oklahoma was lousy with all kinds of spiders and scorpions. DelPrego hated the thought of escaping gangsters only to have a brown recluse scuttle up his jeans and bite him on the gnads.

  Voices.

  DelPrego held his breath, cocked an ear toward the open window above him. A conversation. He felt footsteps shaking the flimsy trailer, coming toward the window. DelPrego pressed himself as flat and as low as possible.

  “What’re you doing?” The first voice.

  “Mmmpgh Mmbf Mmmmmm.” The other.

  “No, leave it open. It stinks in here.”

  “Mmmph. Mmmm.”

  “Then put your jacket back on, but leave it open.”

  The footsteps retreated from the window. “Mmmph mmmmm?”

  “Because Red Zach said so. If they come back, we grab ’em if possible or call his
boys in for backup.”

  The other voice uttered a string of garbled nonsense.

  “I don’t like it either, Eddie. You think I want some coon giving me orders? But once we straighten this Jenks kid out, they’ll go back to St. Louis and we’ll be sitting on a gold mine. No more small-time.”

  “Mmmm mmmph mmmm.”

  “Me too. What you want?”

  “Mmmph.”

  “We had fucking Taco Bell yesterday.”

  They argued five minutes about lunch. The first voice told the mumble voice he’d be back in thirty minutes. DelPrego heard the front door slam. A few seconds later an engine cranked, vehicle noise fading on the road out front. A second later the TV went on. DelPrego listened. It sounded like a game show.

  Anger. Someone was in his home watching his damn television. Probably drank his last beer. He found himself getting up. Some remote bastion of intelligence shouted to the rest of his brain that a truck and a trailer and a ten-year-old RCA television were not worth dying for. But there he was crawling under the window, heading for the back door.

  At the back door he stopped, took the little oilcan out of his jacket pocket. The old redneck janitor Brad Eubanks had gotten it for him last night. Even then, DelPrego had been thinking, putting the plan together in his mind. He squirted oil on the hinges, made sure to use plenty. He squirted oil into the lock, anyplace that might make a noise.

  He took the back-door key from his pocket. He’d removed it from his key ring so it wouldn’t jingle against the other keys. He inserted it in the lock. Slowly. He pinched the key between thumb and forefinger, froze, listened. The game show drifted from the open window. DelPrego made himself breathe. Then he turned the key.

  The lock slid back and DelPrego cracked the door an inch. No sound. He put his ear to the crack to make sure the game show was still going. It was. He looked inside but couldn’t see very far down the hall. The hall went past a little place where a washer and dryer would go if DelPrego had them. Then past the kitchen and opened up into the living room/dining room combo area. The TV was against the far wall in the living room. The whole trailer was like a cramped miniature version of a real house. A strong gust of wind would blow the whole thing over. It was a flimsy dwelling. The floor creaked. DelPrego would have to step lightly.