Shotgun Opera

by Victor Gischler

  Vincent moaned, squeezed hot tears from the corners of his eyes, and tried to slither on his belly under the bed. He’d deluded himself that maybe she hadn’t noticed him yet. His whole body shook. When he felt the hand on his ankle, he pissed himself.

  She pulled him out from under the bed, and he curled fetal, hands over his face, waiting for bullets to rip into his body.

  “Look at me,” she said. “Stop crying. Pay attention.”

  Slowly, he turned his head, looked at her through the fingers still over his face. She didn’t look like the devil. Pretty. Sharp features. Straight back. Really good posture.

  She pointed her machine pistol at his face. He flinched, closed his eyes again.

  “I’m looking for Andrew Foley. Do you know where he is?”

  “Don’t kill me.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  Vincent was blubbering now, snot and tears rolling down his face, big sobs wracking his body. “P-please. Please I didn’t see anything I ”

  She adjusted her aim from his face to his leg and shattered his kneecap with a single shot. Vincent screamed, throat raw and voice pitched high. Blood fountained dark and thick. A wave of nausea swept over Vincent. He rolled onto his side, spewed half-digested pasta and red wine. Drool and vomit trailed down his chin.

  She pointed the pistol at his other leg. “I did that to focus your attention, Vincent. I hope you won’t make me do it again.”

  Vincent shook his head, stifled another moan. “N-no.”

  “One more time. Where can I find Andrew Foley?”

  It didn’t occur to Vincent for even a moment to lie. “Oklahoma.”

  She frowned. “Narrow it down for me.”

  “Near Tulsa, maybe. I don’t know for sure.” He winced. His knee throbbed. It felt somehow frozen and on fire at the same time. If he could just get out of this, just telling this fucking bitch what she wanted to know, he could get to a hospital. He didn’t dare let himself wonder if he’d ever walk right again. He just wanted a doctor and morphine.

  “He’s got some kind of family there,” Vincent said. “He left last night. Took the bus.”

  “He was running? He knew I was coming for him?”

  Vincent gulped and nodded. “He heard about Juice Luciano.”

  She went quiet a moment, seemed to contemplate what Vincent had told her. She sighed, shook her head. Then she looked at Vincent again as if remembering he was still there.

  She put two bullets in his head and walked out, her mind dwelling on her next move.

  PART TWO

  10

  Andrew Foley had limped off the bus in Tulsa, stretched, found the one and only taxi parked in front of the bus station, took it to a Travel Lodge, where he’d taken a hot shower and gone to bed for five hours. He’d woken up, ate BBQ ribs from a place near the hotel, watched TV, strummed a few songs on the mandolin, and slept some more.

  He didn’t want to call his uncle. He didn’t even know the guy.

  Now it was the next morning, checkout time was in an hour, and he had nowhere to go. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the phone.

  He checked his wallet, confirmed he was down to forty-three bucks. He couldn’t live in the Travel Lodge the rest of his life. No more stalling. He looked for the old picture of his dad and uncle in his duffel bag, couldn’t find it, and began to search more frantically. He turned over the duffel bag, dumped everything out, searched again.

  The picture wasn’t there.

  Andrew closed his eyes, pictured the interior of his apartment. He could see the photo on the counter next to his phone. “Son of a bitch.” He remembered, with only a little relief, that he’d transferred his uncle’s number into his address book. Still, he felt like a moron. He’d had the photo for years, and now when it was actually relevant to saving his ass, he’d left it behind.

  Andrew picked up the phone, exhaled, dialed.

  * * *

  Mike Foley pretended he’d forgotten about his nephew and went about the business of the vineyard. Keone had arrived to finish cleaning the carboys. The sun rose, baked the world, the thick black flies buzzing their summer song. Mike would not water the vines today. He’d watered yesterday, and too much moisture was bad for the shallow roots.

  He climbed the steep ridge that marked his property line, looked back down over the vine rows. The middle rows were straight, but the rows on either end were crooked. Mike frowned. He’d never noticed that before. He thought he’d like surveying his work from above, but distance and height showed him how sloppy he’d been. The grapes, he supposed, wouldn’t know the difference. It still annoyed him.

  He cast about for something else to look at. He looked past the rows to the hill on the other side. The two-story house at the top. Nice house, white, blue shutters, big porch that wrapped around most of the back and side. He saw Linda watering her flower boxes and waved. She didn’t wave back, probably couldn’t see him among the trees at this distance.

  Linda Charles was a gentle black woman, forty years old, lived alone. Her husband had been a Chicago cop, shot twice in the chest when he’d chased a purse snatcher onto an elevated train. Linda had buried her husband with full honors, then declared she wanted to move someplace where she could look in every direction and not see pavement. Mike had shared coffee and conversation with her a dozen times since she’d moved to Oklahoma ten months ago.

  His knees gave him a little trouble as he climbed back down the ridge, and he reminded himself to lather up with Bengay later. When he got back to the barn, Keone was standing in the open doorway.

  “Phone,” he said.

  Mike’s stomach lurched. His knees had almost made him forget about his nephew. Who was this kid? What was his trouble and what did Mike owe him? His brother’s only son.

  He picked up the phone at his desk. “Hello?” He held his breath.

  “Was that you coming down that hill?” Linda said.

  “I was surveying my domain,” Mike said. “I waved at you.”

  “I missed it, but it looked like you were about to fall on your ass.”

  “It’s steep.”

  “Can you do that thing with my riding mower again?” Linda asked. “It won’t start.”

  “Did you leave it out again after the last time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You need to cover it with a tarp or something.”

  “Well, I didn’t. Can you fix it? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  Mike said, “I don’t fix things for coffee. A beer.”

  “I might have a beer around here someplace.”

  “Two beers if it’s really screwed up.”

  “Let me see what I have, and I’ll call you right back.” She hung up.

  Keone still stood in the barn doorway, looking at Mike.

  “Well? What do you want?”

  “I finished the carboys,” Keone said.

  “Go get my socket set. Linda left her mower in the rain again. And a dry rag.”

  Keone took off running.

  The phone rang. Mike grabbed it. “I forgot to mention it has to be imported.”

  A pause. “Uncle Mike?”

  “Shit.” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

  * * *

  Mike drove his pickup truck the hour and a half to Tulsa, pulled into the drop-off zone in front of the Travel Lodge. He leaned across the truck’s bench seat and opened the passenger door, looked at the young man with the duffel slung over his shoulder. The kid’s face was blank, but he shifted from foot to foot like he was nervous or had to piss. He wore faded jeans, Timberlands, a wrinkled Nike T-shirt.

  “Andrew?”

  The kid opened his mouth, closed it again, nodded.

  “I’m ” Mike couldn’t bring himself to say your uncle. “I’m your dad’s brother. Get in.”

  Andrew got in.

  They drove. Mike took 75 north out of Tulsa, turned west onto Highway 20. They passed through Skiatook and Pawhuska and into an area Mike called “no cell phone reception.” He turned north on a two-lane that went from pavement to gravel after five miles and threaded its way
gradually up and into the low hills where Mike lived. He pulled onto the narrow access road and parked the truck in front of the cabin.

  They hadn’t said one word to each other the entire drive.

  Mike motioned Andrew to follow him into the cabin. Mike threw his keys on the table, checked his answering machine. No messages. He looked back at Andrew. The kid was standing in the doorway, scanning the interior of the cabin, his duffel dangling from his hand.

  “Toss your bag next to the coatrack,” Mike said. “We’ll figure out where to put you later. Hungry?”

  “I’m good.” Andrew shut the door behind him, dropped the duffel in the corner.

  “Have a seat. Take it easy.”

  Andrew sat at the table, put his chin in his hands. “Thanks. For coming to get me, I mean.”

  “Sure.”

  Mike went to the kitchen, grabbed two bottles of beer from the fridge, and joined Andrew at the table. He unscrewed both caps, pushed one bottle toward the kid.

  “That’s okay,” Andrew said.

  Mike left it there in case he changed his mind, gulped his own halfway down. Beer might not do it, he thought. Somewhere there was a bottle of Wild Turkey. He tried to remember where he’d stashed it. Maybe down in the wine cellar. He drank the rest of his beer.

  Andrew cleared his throat, ran a hand through his hair. “I guess it’s about time I explain myself.”

  Mike wasn’t going to ask. Let the kid talk when he was ready. “Is this story going to take over five minutes?”

  “Probably.”

  “Hold on.” Mike went to the kitchen, came back with another beer. “Okay.”

  Andrew told it all. He didn’t rush or embellish. He started with Vincent and Anthony in the warehouse and the Arab guy in the container and the warning phone call from Vincent that Juice Luciano had been blown to bits. He’d paused only once to take a swig of beer.

  “Dad told me to call you,” Andrew said. “If it was life-and-death, call Uncle Mike. I honestly never thought Well, anyway, here I am.” He drained the beer, fiddled with the empty bottle.

  Mike leaned back in his chair, sighed, drummed his fingers. He pushed back from the table. “I have to piss. Be right back.”

  In the bathroom he unzipped, rocked heel to toe, and waited for the flow. Pissing wasn’t as effortless as it used to be. He grunted, passed gas. Then the urine.

  He stood there, thought about his brother. The brother who’d taken a bullet for him, who’d always been there. Then Mike had that breakdown, put his guns away, wouldn’t touch or look at them. This hadn’t been a moral decision. Ethics didn’t enter into it, at least not in some conscious political way.

  His gut had heaved whenever he went into a firefight. The guns got heavy, cold sweat under his arms and on his neck. He went clammy, nauseous. When Mike Foley picked up a pistol his arms and legs turned to water. He was ashamed, scared he’d get his brother killed. Dan would need him, and Mike wouldn’t be there when things got hot.

  So Mike ran. He ran, and he didn’t look back. Ten or twenty or thirty years later, he’d still been too ashamed to look up Dan, to reconnect with the only family he had.

  Now he had family again, a nephew sitting lost and scared at his dining room table. But did he want that now? Was it too late? All family did was remind Mike how he’d come up short. He’d started over, started a new life. It wasn’t fair. Mike resented it, resented the kid for needing him.

  His piss dribbled down to nothing. He shook, zipped up.

  He washed his hands slowly at the sink, still thinking and stalling. Maybe he was blowing this out of proportion. What were the chances anyone back East would think of looking for Andrew here? Most of the guys from his old neighborhood didn’t know Oklahoma from Ohio from the dark side of the moon.

  Maybe the kid would sleep on his couch for a month, get bored with the boondocks, go home, and that would be all there was to it.

  Mike wiped his hands on his pants, went back to the table. He rubbed the back of his neck, tried to think of something to say to the kid. What could they possibly have in common? The phone rang and saved him.

  He grabbed it. “Hello?”

  “Where did you go?” Linda asked.

  “Sorry, something came up. You called? I didn’t see a message on the machine.”

  “I called, didn’t leave a message. You going to fix my mower or are you busy now? I can wait a day or two.”

  “No, no,” Mike said. “Give me twenty minutes.” He hung up.

  “I have to do a favor for a neighbor,” he told Andrew.

  “Okay.”

  “Anything you want in the fridge is fine. Bathroom’s over there. Watch TV if you want.”

  “Okay.”

  “The machine will answer if anybody calls. If you see an Indian kid messing around in the yard, that’s Keone. Leave him alone. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah, okay. Back soon.” He scooped up his keys and left.

  11

  Mike drank one of Linda’s beers while he took out her mower’s spark plug, dried it, cleared the water out of the fuel line. He emptied the old, watered-down gas into a bucket and filled the tank again. He drank another beer. He put the mower back together, cranked it up to make sure it started.

  Linda came out to her front porch. She was tall, lean bordering on bony, hair pulled back into a tight knot. High cheekbones. Very dark skin. She wore jeans and leather sandals and a pink blouse. “You got it going,” she shouted over the mower noise.

  He nodded, gave her the thumbs-up.

  “Shut it off.”

  Mike looked at his wristwatch. “For another beer I’ll mow it for you.”

  She looked at him sideways, like maybe he was joking. “You sure?”

  “I got time.”

  He climbed into the saddle, began the rhythmic back and forth of mowing Linda’s lawn. He let his mind drift, half-concentrating on the neat rows in the grass, letting the vibrating roar of the mower engine drown out any thoughts that were too complicated or disturbing to deal with at the moment. But soon he’d run out of lawn, and he’d have to park the mower and decide what the hell he was going to do with the kid in his living room.

  He finished the lawn and parked the mower on the side of the house next to her wheelbarrow and a loose pile of rakes and shovels. She really needed a shed.

  Linda came back out on the porch. “Done?”

  “No problem.”

  “You didn’t have to do that, but thanks. I’m out of beer.”

  Mike looked at his watch again, shuffled his feet. “That’s okay.”

  “Something wrong?” She leaned on the porch railing. “You seem distracted. And you drank all my beer. Usually you’re way too polite to even have a second cup of coffee.”