Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  “Without the eye roll and without the attitude.”

  His scowl deepened as he weighed what was happening. His eyes reddened. “I promise to work with you.”

  Wendy gave the tabletop a triumphant pat with both palms. “Excellent. Let’s get started.”

  * * *

  Ethan had spent a decade trying to forget the events of that afternoon. At times, he thought maybe he’d even been successful, and at other times, when the memories sneaked in anyway, the self-medication could help. Until it didn’t. Often those were the worst times of all. It seemed that the drugs worked both ways. When they were helpful, they kept the memories at bay. But then there were the times when they made it impossible for him to turn them off.

  The doctor’s question wasn’t really a question at all, but rather an opening—the same shit that shrinks pulled all the time. Tell me about what happened eleven years ago.

  “It’s got to be in that report you read,” Ethan said.

  The doctor did a weird thing with her face. Half smiling and half pained, she cocked her head to the left and seemed to look straight through him—all the way to his spine. “The report says you claimed to have been kidnapped eleven years ago. That’s the exact language—you claimed to have been kidnapped.”

  Translation: They don’t believe me. “Well, there you go,” he said.

  “You know better,” the doctor said. “Even dismissing the conditional language—the poisonous claimed—saying that you were kidnapped is like saying of World War Two that the Nazis and the allies had a spat. I need to know the details.”

  “I have no idea what happened in World War Two.”

  Her eyes flashed anger. “Really? Is that how you’re going to honor our agreement that is not yet five minutes old? Passive-aggressiveness is the strategy of cowards. And trust me, you are nowhere as good at it as other patients I’ve dealt with.”

  Ethan felt heat rising in his face. “What do you want from me?” he said, louder than he’d intended. “I don’t know who the hell you are. You say you’re a doctor—a shrink. Well, okay, I’ll tell you that I’m an astrophysicist. Are you ready for me to map the universe for you? I don’t even remember your name!”

  “Dr. Wendy Adams,” she said. She’d made her voice quieter, an old standard in shrink strategies to get him to lower his own. “You can call me Wendy. And the fact of the matter, young man, is that I am likely your last hope. Even if I made all of that up, tell me where the downside is for you trusting me.”

  Ethan had lost count of the number of shrinks who had tried to drill into his brain over the years. Hey, crazy boy. Do you have nightmares? Do you have violent fantasies? Can we trust you not to bring a bazooka into your school and blow everybody away? While those might not have been the actual questions, they were always the subtext, and the easiest route to be excused from the exercise was to lie. Tell them that you sleep like a baby every night, that your only thoughts were about roses and springtime, and that your life’s ambition was to save whales or children—or both—and they scribble good things in your chart and you get your life back. The last thing any psychiatrist wanted was to deal with a problem that needed to be fixed. They wanted to give you a handful of pills and call it a closed case.

  Something about this shrink, though, felt different. For one, she didn’t talk to him in that singsongy pitiful voice that the others used. And she didn’t bow to his bullshit. She didn’t close the file and say, if you want to be that way, fine. I’m done. Plus, she didn’t look like a shrink. Instead of some precious professional business suit, she wore blue jeans, a pink top and a sport coat—or whatever the hell ladies called a sport coat. She looked both athletic and feminine, a combination that was difficult to pull off. Maybe forty-five years old, he didn’t believe that the platinum blond hair was natural, but she wore it well, cropped close to her head without looking butch. Maybe it was time for him to roll the dice. Like she said, there wasn’t a lot to lose at this point.

  Well, except his life. But that wasn’t on such a bright course as it was.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I have to trust someone and you’re it.”

  * * *

  “I was stupid,” Ethan said. “You hear all that stranger-danger bullshit from your parents and from teachers, and you just let it roll out of your head unheard, you know?”

  “There’s nothing stupid in being a victim,” the doctor said.

  Ethan felt a swell of anger. “Been a victim much yourself, Doc?” he snapped. He didn’t want to be rude—in fact, he really wanted to like this one—but that was such a shrink-like thing to say. “I know what I did, and I know it was stupid. I’m not making excuses for the shitheads who did what they did to me, but I was there, and you were not.”

  Dr. Adams seemed startled. “I was just—”

  “You were just trying to get ahead of me. You were just preventing that moment when I say something self-destructive. I’ve been to this well before, you know. How about you let me talk and you sit there and listen?” That was a lot of anger—much more than the situation warranted—and he didn’t know where it came from. He considered apologizing, but that impulse came and went.

  “I was supposed to be at football practice,” Ethan explained. Only he decided to skip out on it. It was too hot out and more and more, he just wasn’t that much into football. The friends he’d known for as long as he’d known anyone had all started to grow at twice the rate that he was, and where he used to be the best athlete among them, now he could barely hold his own. It was embarrassing. His mom had tried to tell him that it was all so very natural—he was at that awkward age—but that was embarrassing, too.

  So, he’d pedaled his bike from the house to the end of the street, and then off to the 7-Eleven down on Hawkins Turnpike, way the hell and gone from anyplace he was ever supposed to be. Times were tough back at the house with Mom and Dad tearing at each other over whatever it was that parents who love each other hate each other about. Ethan wasn’t in much of a mood to keep them happy, so this was the afternoon of his rebellion. Not just skipping out on practice, but then going to a place he wasn’t supposed to be to buy the most enormous, highest-sugar Big Gulp that he could afford. It was the stuff of his mother’s nightmares, and that was just fine.

  Once he got to the 7-Eleven, it was Slurpee time. He was drawn to the blue raspberry flavor, until he realized what color that was going to turn his mouth. It was fine to take chances and risk getting in trouble, but it would have been stupid to stain your lips and teeth and tongue, and therefore guarantee trouble when he got home. Lemon-lime would have been the smartest bet, but it made no sense to be a pussy about it. He chose the Coke, a Slurpee that was only slightly smaller than the galvanized trash can he had to drag back and forth from the curb every Sunday and Thursday night.

  “The owner was an old fart,” he explained, drawing a smile from Wendy. “I tried to hang around to drink it, but he said I couldn’t loiter, and that I had to leave the store. I could stand outside if I wanted to, but I couldn’t take up space inside.”

  The problem was, it was still hot as hell outside and he had five pints of flavored ice chips to get down before they melted. After a brain freeze that felt like his skull had been cleaved with a dull hatchet, he surrendered his mission as a lost cause. Plus, he still had a half hour of pedaling to do to get home by anything close to the dinner hour. To be home later than seven o’clock was the Falk family equivalent of treason, and the penalties were similar.

  “Mom would go ape shit if I was even a minute late. It was my responsibility to call in. She said that one minute of worry on her part was more of a problem than any inconvenience I might have in finding a pay phone to call home.”

  “No cell phone, then?” the doc asked.

  Ethan coughed out a laugh. “Clearly, you never met my mom. No, no son of hers was going to be distracted from his school work by a phone.” That sounded too harsh under the circumstances. “But remember, this was a long t
ime ago. Pay phones actually existed back then.”

  “But you didn’t call,” Wendy said. “Surely there was a phone at the 7-Eleven.”

  “What was I going to say?” Ethan countered. “By then, it was a little after six, I guess, so I still had time to roll the dice.”

  What he hadn’t counted on was running over a nail in the road. In all his years of biking, he’d never had a blowout. He’d never even thought about one. And he sure as hell had not been prepared to lose a front tire going downhill. He didn’t remember a bang or even a pop when it blew. All he knew was that the steering wobbled for maybe two seconds, and then the handlebars jerked hard to the left, and he was airborne.

  “All that talk about accidents happening in slow motion is bullshit,” Ethan said. “I mean, it was like a snap. I was in my seat, and then I was flying. And then I was on the ground, half on the gravel and half on the grass.”

  By some miracle of good luck, he flipped in flight, landing on his back and shoulders, thereby sparing his face and his teeth. That was the first time he’d ever had the wind knocked out of him. As he struggled for the next breath, he remembered thinking that he was about to die.

  “I was scared,” he said. “Really, really scared.”

  “Were you badly hurt?”

  “Nothing broken,” he said. “And I don’t think I hit my head all that hard, but I had a lot of road rash. Even that, though, wasn’t horrible. No streaming blood anywhere.”

  “You were lucky,” Wendy said, and immediately tried to pull the words back.

  Ethan gave a genuine laugh. “Yeah, lucky. And you’ve even read ahead in my story.”

  She was pretty when she blushed. “I’m so sorry. That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant. So, now I was stuck on the side of this road with a broken bicycle, skinned up everywhere, and with only one shoe.”

  “What happened to the other shoe?”

  “I have no idea,” Ethan said. “Weird, the things you remember. Somehow, I got blasted out of my shoe, and I couldn’t find it anywhere.”

  “Was there any traffic?” Wendy asked. “Didn’t anyone try to help you?”

  “Just one car,” Ethan said, and his mood darkened. “One goddamn car.”

  Chapter Ten

  It was getting late, and Ethan was getting scared. The window of opportunity for arriving home without punishment had closed, and the sun was beginning to dip low. You’d think that a place with the word turnpike in its name would have more cars driving down it, but that was not the case for the Hawkins. This was a country road where no one who lived along it had any place to go, and knew no one who wanted to visit them. A long stretch of loneliness.

  As he pushed his crippled bicycle down the shoulder, its front wheel all but useless, Ethan considered several times dragging the bike down a long driveway to one of the houses that lay nestled in the trees, but the same vexing question kept him moving along: What am I going to tell my parents?

  Ethan heard the engine before he sensed the presence of the car. It was a throaty sound, a more powerful engine than most. He felt the vibration in his feet. He turned to look at the approaching vehicle, and as he did, it slowed. As it passed, he didn’t recognize the logo on the hood, but it was a hot-looking beast. A two-door hardtop, it looked like something Batman would drive. It slowed as it passed, and for a brief instant, Ethan thought that his savior had arrived. Then it pulled away, only to pull over to the shoulder and stop a few dozen yards farther down the street. Its hazard flashers popped on.

  Finally, the vehicle’s door opened and a man unfolded himself from the driver’s seat. He was of the age that Ethan had a hard time identifying. Roughly the age of his parents, maybe a year or two older. The most striking thing Ethan noticed was the darkness of his dark beard. His height was hard to judge, too, because of the squattiness of the car.

  “Are you okay?” the driver called.

  “I’m fine,” Ethan said, despite the fact that he was anything but.

  “What happened to your bike?”

  “I wrecked it.”

  The stranger laughed. “Well, I can see that. Are you hurt?” He checked over his shoulder and started to approach.

  At that moment, Ethan felt no fear at all. Instead, he felt relief that someone was there to help. “Not really. Skinned up a little, but not really hurt.”

  Maybe twenty-five feet separated them. “How old are you?”

  “Eleven,” Ethan said. “Almost twelve. My birthday’s in two months.”

  “Eleven and five-sixths, then.” His smile widened. “What’s your name?” Ten feet.

  “Ethan Falk.”

  The man offered his hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Ethan Falk. My name is Joey. Joey McFadden.”

  Ethan shook the man’s hand, and in retrospect, the contact lingered just a few beats too long. His first inkling of trouble.

  “Let’s take a look at you,” Joey said, and he stooped to look closer at the boy’s bare legs. He touched one of the scrapes, and Ethan jumped. “Sorry,” he said. “It doesn’t look too bad. He stood. “Lift your shirt and we’ll see if you’re hurt there.”

  “I’m not,” Ethan said, and he took a step back. “I already checked.”

  Joey mirrored his step back. “I frightened you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can see how that would make you . . . Well, you know. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Joey looked at his watch. “It’s getting late. Do your parents know where you are?”

  Ethan’s face got hot. “No.”

  “Uh-oh. They’re going to be worried, aren’t they?”

  “More like pissed.”

  “I guess that kind of worry always leads to pissed,” Joey said. “Why don’t you go to one of these houses and call home? They can pick you up.”

  Ethan pivoted his head to look down one of the driveways. “That’s complicated,” he said.

  “Look, they’re not going to get any less pissed the longer you wait.”

  Ethan took a long, deep breath. The guy had a point. Anger had to peak someplace, right? By now, Mom was going to be ready to declare war. She’d be calling the cops soon. If he called, at least he could cap the worry. Maybe the relief would even give him some points in the good column.

  “It’s the only smart move,” Joey said. “Look, I’ve got kids, and it hasn’t been that long since I was one. Tell you what. Put your bike down there off the road for a second, and I’ll let you use my phone. It’s in the car.” He started walking back to his vehicle.

  Something didn’t feel right. Ethan hesitated, but there’s no way he could have articulated why. Joey seemed nice enough. It wasn’t as if he—

  Joey turned. “Are you calling, or aren’t you?” Ethan caught the exasperation in the man’s voice, the subtext of, Dude, I’m doing you a freaking favor here.

  Ethan pushed his bike to the side of the road, into the ditch, where he propped it more or less upright. When he turned back, Joey was still waiting for him, beckoning him with an extended arm, wiggling his fingers in the darkening shadows. “Don’t look so glum, for God’s sake,” he said. “This will all pass.”

  He waited till Ethan was astride, and then placed his hand on his shoulder. He squeezed. Just a little. “Whoa. Muscles. You must be an athlete.”

  Ethan smiled. “Football. That’s where I was supposed to be.”

  Joey guided him to the passenger-side door and opened it. “There’s the phone,” he said. It was on the center console. “Help yourself.”

  * * *

  “I guess that’s when he hit me,” Ethan concluded. “I remember it as a flash of light and the smell you get when you hit your head really hard. Blood, I guess.”

  Dr. Wendy’s face had folded into a raisiny scowl. He couldn’t tell if it was sympathy or distrust. She hadn’t said anything in a long time.

  “What?” Ethan said. “You don’t look like you believe me.”

  “Is it safe for me
to assume that Joey was in fact the man you killed in the parking lot?”

  Ethan inhaled to answer, but something broke free in his head—an image he hadn’t thought of until this very minute. “No!” he proclaimed. He could hear the excitement in his own voice, and he could see that it startled her. “No, he wasn’t. That guy—the guy I killed—called himself Bill. I never believed that that was his name, but that’s what he called himself.”

  Now Wendy looked confused. “I don’t remember any mention of someone named Bill,” she said. “Not in as many times as you’ve told the story.”

  “I know!” Ethan said. His heart pounded. “I just now remembered that. There was more than one guy involved. There were a bunch. Maybe four. I guess they just ran together in my head.”

  “Bill,” Wendy said. There was that look again.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you. I just haven’t heard any mention of Bill before.”

  “We’ve never spoken before. Plus, I just told you.”

  “Suppressed memory,” Wendy said. “You’ve told your story to a lot of other people, though. You’ve never mentioned a Bill, but now in a flash, you do. At just the right time to start building that insanity defense that you said you didn’t want.”

  Anger boiled in Ethan’s gut. He was being played. “I thought you said you were the one I could trust.”

  Wendy’s features didn’t change a bit. “I am,” she said.

  “But you don’t believe me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “And you keep coming back to that. Do I believe you? I’m trying to, but every word you say is fantastic—in the sense of the word that it has no basis in verifiable fact. It’s fantasy.”

  The anger bloomed larger. Ethan felt himself shutting down.

  “You’re getting pissed,” Wendy said. “Your body language says that you’re done talking, that you’re going to punish me by keeping your story to yourself.”

  “What’s the sense of telling it?”

  “As opposed to which alternative?” Still, her face showed nothing. Not disinterest, exactly, but in-your-face brutality.