Couch

by Benjamin Parzybok

  He shoved against Jean and yelled, “What have you done to him!” He jumped from bed and ran down the stairs toward Tree’s room, a faint, wounded call following him.

  He burst into Tree’s room and was relieved to see a form there in bed, snoring loudly. Turning the light on he saw the bristling mustache of Erik. “Erik,” he shouted. “Erik!” And shook his shoulders violently.

  Erik woke bleary-eyed. “Thom! Knock it off, fuckhead.”

  “Where’s Tree?”

  “How the hell should I know? I’m asleep, you bastard. Where were you? You’re the one who’s missing.”

  “Jean . . .” Thom trailed off. Tree was standing in the doorway, his face the color of desert bone, and Jean stood behind him, hastily dressed. Thom realized he was completely naked, standing in the middle a scene of his own brash creation.

  “I . . . I’ve been in the bathroom a lot tonight,” Tree said. He cradled his stomach with his hands.

  “Oh sweetie,” Jean said and patted Tree on the shoulder.

  Thom wasn’t exactly sure how to extract himself from the situation he was in, naked and smelling of sex and sweat and full of misplaced accusations.

  Erik gave him a sly smile, winked, and rolled toward the wall. “At least one of us got lucky last night,” Erik said and pulled the covers over his head. “False alarm, people.” Erik’s voice came muffled through bedding. “Go back to your love den and let a drunkard get some shut-eye.”

  Thom walked doggedly behind Jean back to her room. Jean got back into bed with him, but after several dozen apologies Thom still couldn’t shake off a seed of distrust.

  “Trust me, Thom,” Jean said. “I liked you. I was intrigued—by you and the project—and so I followed. I’ve got a journalist’s curiosity, and I don’t think I’ve done anything to earn your distrust.”

  “Okay,” he nodded and smiled. “I’ll try—I do,” he said, and believed that he did. To seal the deal and burn off excess doubt, they made love again.

  At breakfast they went over the plan and decided that what they’d talked about as a plan was not worth another moment’s thought.

  Thom’s stomach was in a talkative frenzy, but otherwise he felt better than he had in a while. He even cavalierly tried a bit or two of the wheat toast, just to celebrate. Remember last night? brain said. Remember how you were last night? Somebody likes you. I know, I know. Yes, but remember the rest of last night? But maybe she does. Maybe she likes me.

  He quickly cased his roommates to make sure no one was staring at him and took another bite of toast. “Let’s just go down there and knock.” Thom smiled and shrugged. “Why not?”

  “We’ll get ourselves killed? Didn’t I already mention that that was a prerequisite, that we not get ourselves killed?” Erik’s eyes were rimmed red from alcohol and smoke and dancing and sexual frustration, and he was cross. He took the tines of his fork and raked at his mustache. “Arrgh! When does the freaking vacation part of our vacation start?”

  They’d walked by the house where the couch was. The large metal door to the courtyard was halfway down a well-used public stairway, a giant four story house that towered over the river Tomebamba, which Erik had been informed meant Sacrificial Knife Basin. Super. The couch wasn’t hidden in an obscure, highly guarded crevasse of Cuenca, but in a house near the social hub.

  “You’re sure. I mean you are absolutely sure you saw our couch?” Erik grilled Jean for the third time.

  “No, Erik, like I said, it seemed like your couch from what I remember of it. It was a couch, and as Thom said one of the men matched your description of who took the couch. However, I don’t see you having a lot of other leads.”

  “Nobody is going to get killed,” Thom said cheerfully, not having any evidence to back it up. “Everything will be fine! Besides, Erik, you’ve already died once this trip. It didn’t hurt you any.”

  “Are you proposing to just knock and ask for it back?”

  “Never hurts to ask, that’s what my mom always says.” Aware that he was being absurd. There seemed ample space for absurdity.

  “Yeah, maybe . . .” Tree said.

  “Tree, please don’t go along with this idiocy,” Erik said. “He’s being ridiculous. Even you can see that. Something has destroyed his mind.” Erik raised an eyebrow at Jean.

  “I don’t know. My dad used to say that too,” Tree said.

  Jean giggled. “And if they say no?”

  “It’s valuable, very valuable,” Erik imitated Per.

  “Then we’ll use Plan B,” Thom said

  “What’s that?”

  “Break in. Plan A for ask. B for break-in. C for crush them like flies,” Thom said and ground his fist into his palm.

  “And D for dying, dumbass,” Erik said.

  “Sounds good.” Tree stood up. “Let’s go.”

  “Tree!” Erik reached across the table and pushed Tree back into his seat. “That is not a plan.”

  “Really though,” Thom said, “let’s go up and just talk and see who we’re dealing with.” He felt he could lift them all up onto his shoulders, carry them parade-style through the city, this lovely group, far enough away from home for none of it to matter.

  Erik stared into his coffee, talked with resentment and exhaustion. “Because they’ll be on guard, they’ll move the couch, they’ll be a lot harder to deal with,” he said. “But nobody listens to Erik. Erik who’s being smart. Hello?”

  But the group was on its way already.

  Thom stood in front of the metal door in the tall concrete wall and knocked. He was halfway down a wide stone stairway with multiple landings. A stairway Rocky would have used, he thought, and then realized there were Rockys already on it, climbing to the top in their sweaty jogging suits, running down, repeating. The stairway was a major thoroughfare with a doorway in the middle. Jean, Erik and Tree were all at the top of the stairway looking down nervously, ready to fight or run or do whatever their bodies did when fear pushed too hard. Why wasn’t he afraid? All that fear yesterday. . . . His brain presented the image of a flushing toilet, psshhrrrr, flushing backward, brain reminded, and he knocked.

  He knocked a third time—looked at Jean at the top of the stairs, curly haired and nervous for him, her hands clenched together, all of them waving him away, Erik pacing, and he waved back. When no one answered the door, he tried the handle and, voila!, pushed the door open. There was a wide courtyard, a neglected garden in the center, a cement house that was built tall and not deep, scaling the hillside. A set of steps led up to the main entrance. Thom stepped in and swung the door closed, and behind it was the man in the straw hat, his friendly face working through expressions like a slot machine, his nightstick replaced with a sawed-off shotgun. He fumbled through the motions of pointing it at Thom. Thom had imagined this moment a hundred times. He felt practiced, his fists balled, the body tense, ready to pounce, but the brain had neglected to visualize a gun in the scenario, the one that was pushed against his chest.

  The friendly face looking friendly again. “How’s your head?” it said.

  “There’s still a lump,” Thom admitted, realizing the fear toilet wasn’t working. It was backing up.

  “You’ve come for your couch, have you?”

  Thom nodded.

  “You realize I will have to kill you now,” the man said.

  Thom nodded again, feeling relieved, a win-win situation. The man was repeating phrases from the movies, which meant at any moment the rest of the good guys would show up. And if not, if the good guys nervously huddled at the top of the stairs talking about plans B and C and D until a shot went off, then the whole adventure would be over for him and he could have a nice restful afterlife buried in Ecuador. What would his mother think? From looking for a job in Portland to dead in Ecuador. More bugs in the soil here, brain volunteered, buried in Incan land. The man was pushing him across the courtyard. Thom walked backward, his hands up now, the gun being used as a steering device for his body, the brain quickly
playing out a couple of action sequences and then dismissing them. They steered around the upraised center garden, the gun-barrel jabs insistent—garden needs watering, brain volunteered; the calmness before death—and then the door opened.

  Friendly face glanced towards the door, and then returned his focus to Thom where there was a piston’s forward action, Thom’s fist at the end of it. “Kerpow!” Thom said, and for a moment the man’s straw hat hung in the air without attachment. Drawn permanently at that altitude as the body fell away. And then the hat drifted easily down atop friendly face’s chest, where he lay with blood in his teeth.

  “Thom!” Erik said. Tree and Jean stood beside him. “Are you okay?”

  Get the gun, brain said.

  Erik, Tree, and Jean were immobile. The door closed behind them. Thom grabbed the gun, some knowledge coming to him, its use, function. He held it by its barrel in his left hand, comfortable there, his other hand, those hundreds of bones closed in about themselves with a skin wrapper, a knuckle bleeding, his earth crusher. He walked toward the entrance to the house.

  “Thom,” Jean said. “Wait.”

  “Let’s make a plan.” Erik was fixated on the man on the ground. “Nice hit, man!”

  “No plans,” Thom said and walked up the stairs and to his surprise knocked on the door. Just open it, brain said. He twisted the handle; this door was unlocked too. Not very organized, brain observed. Inside was plush, leather and paintings and antiques mixed with recent chaos. Broken plates littered the floor, a coffee cup broken among shards of mirror glass, one thrown into the other. A chair at a massive dining room table on its back, the table scattered with paper and books.

  From some distant room within, the sound of a TV gone to loud static. A light wind blowing the curtains about where there should have been windows.

  Thom moved toward the noise of the TV, brain still running bits from the movies, transparencies over reality, scenarios that always accompany a TV blaring static: a woman on the bed with a knife in her chest; an absurdly thin man with hollowed eyes in an easy chair, a cigarette butt with an inch and a half of ash still in his hand, heroin; a man in a business suit on the floor, his brains making a mural of one wall, gun still in his right hand.

  Thom stood in front of the door, listening to the static on the other side, Jean behind him, Tree and Erik somewhere in the house. Thom flushed the fear toilet, breathed, then opened the door.

  Inside was a tall Ecuadorian man in his seventies, his hair askew between the straps of dark safety goggles. No TV: in his hand he had a blowtorch making an absurd amount of white noise, and he was applying the torch to the couch. The room had obviously been a den at some point, full of books and ashtrays and a thick rug, but it was piled with tools and broken things and the smell of toxic melting. An armada of destructive tools—a circular saw, drill, axe, hammer, crowbar, all looking as if they’d already failed.

  Thom and Jean stood unnoticed in the doorway watching the smoke rise from the couch, a toxic smell, watched the burn hole spread from the flame and the hole close up like new when the flame retreated. After several more attempts, the man turned off the blowtorch, propped the goggles up on his forehead, and let loose with several kicks to it.

  “Hey! That’s my responsibility.” Erik, behind them now, shuffled through.

  The man looked up alarmed, fumbled for his lighter to relight the torch, let his hands drop when Erik was there and Thom was pointing the gun and it was too late.

  “What were you trying to do? What a mess.”

  “Es invencible,” the man said.

  Erik shrugged, picked up one end of the couch. “Come on, we got what we came for.”

  Jean beat Thom to the other end of the couch, and she and Erik hauled it out of the den, down the hallway, and out, with Tree and Thom following. Friendly face was no longer in the courtyard. Thom picked up the straw hat and put it on his head and dropped the gun in its place. “Well,” he said. “That wasn’t so hard.”

  “What do we do now?” Erik worked his mustache nervously. He thought about the night before, how he’d like to just take a couple of weeks off for a nice fling.

  “I guess take it back to the hotel, right?” Jean said.

  “Back to the hotel, Thom?”

  “Sure, sure.” Thom wondered why everyone was suddenly asking him the questions. Tree trailed behind, forehead sweaty, eyes glazed. Chop chop chop chop—a helicopter loomed over them. Thom looked down the stairs as they reached the top and saw a microbus pull up on the other side of the river. A stream of men climbed out, ran toward them. “Guys?” he said. “They look like . . . they look like they’re coming after us!” He broke into a directionless run and then circled back to help hurry on the couch.

  Erik and Jean were frozen, staring down the stairs and across the bridge at the approaching men. They had guns, and people scattered before them. Thom grabbed the middle of the couch and steered the carriers into action, running down the street past their hotel. Something will come up, something will come up, Thom thought. They went round a corner before the men reached the top of the stairs. Tree stumbled slowly behind.

  “Tree, where the hell do we go next?” Thom hollered. What was wrong with Tree?

  “Let’s just hide it and then figure out where to go,” Jean yelled.

  They moved as best they could down a cobblestone street. Everyone stopped to watch the strange gringo parade move past.

  Tree pointed above buildings toward the Andes, mountains like a Richter scale reading. He dropped his arm without speaking.

  The men rounded the corner of the block behind them, running at full speed.

  “We’re dead, we’re dead!” Thom yelled, lunging forward with the couch so as to turn a corner out of view of their pursuers.

  “There,” Jean said, pointing at a flatbed truck stopped at an intersection. “Erik, you’ve got to explain to him.”

  They dashed forward as the truck began to pull out into the intersection. They heaved the couch up, crashed it onto the truck. It slid on and collided with four cases of Inca Kola. The truck skidded to a halt, the driver whipping around to see who the pirates were. Erik ran around the side and got into the passenger side and Thom and Jean hopped onto the back. They watched Erik argue with the driver as the men came round the corner and sprinted toward them.

  “Christ, where’s Tree?” Thom stood up on the truck. Tree faltered along a few paces in front of the men, his head down, looking like a puppet in the hands of an amateur puppeteer, legs not quite imitating how a human runs. He’ll never make it, Thom realized. A man behind him started reaching for Tree, pushing ahead to grab the boy. “Go!” Thom shouted at Jean. “We’ll catch up!”

  Thom launched off the back of the truck as it lurched forward and ran at full speed toward Tree, his eyes on the six men now only a hairsbreadth behind Tree.

  Thom sidestepped Tree and like a linebacker barreled into the man who gotten hold of Tree’s shirt. Thom bent his knees and pushed up with his shoulder, catching the man’s midsection. The man flew off the ground, whipsawed into a parked car with a sickening sound, and crumpled to the ground. Thom saw Tree still moving, but now he was behind the line of men who were still in pursuit of the truck, which was forcibly stopped by traffic at the next intersection.

  “Tree!” he shouted. Tree was barely moving now, less of a run and more of a loose-limbed stumble, his head bobbing with each step, arms muscleless and banging about his sides. Thom turned and ran back toward him, relieved that the other five men were focused on the truck. “Tree,” he called. “Tree!” But he was unreachable. Thom caught him, put his arms around him from behind to stop him. There was a brief lifeless struggle, Tree’s limbs moving, twitching, and then nothing. Thom turned him around, held him by the shoulders. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Tree’s face was drenched in sweat, and his eyes were slits. Thom glanced up and saw the truck pulling slowly out of the intersection again. Jean stood up in the back, winding up like a ba
seball pitcher, throwing bottles of yellow Inca Kola at the men who followed. Bottles sailed through the air, and she beaned one of the men square in the head. An alarm went off as another broke over the top of a car. Thom had an immense swelling of pride, followed by the panic of getting left behind.

  “Tree!” He gently shook Tree’s shoulders.

  “I don’t feel well.”

  Thom heard shots and looked up. Two of the men had paused in the street with their guns out. He couldn’t see Jean. “Oh God, please.”

  Thom straightened Tree back onto his feet and put his hand to Tree’s sweaty forehead, felt the heat emanating from him. “Shit, do you need to, do you want to go to a doctor?”

  “Follow the couch,” Tree said weakly.

  Thom nodded. “Follow the couch.” He looked around for some means of following the couch. How would they follow the couch? The man he’d hit still lay crumpled on the ground. Thom saw a curved wooden thing sticking out from underneath the man’s jacket. A gun. This is just like the movies too, brain said. Take the enemy’s gun, check it for bullets, spin the cartridge, blow smoke from the barrel. It doesn’t have a cartridge spinny thing, Thom informed brain. And you only blow the smoke after you fire it. He tucked it into the back of his pants like you were supposed to do, and it poked into his spine uncomfortably. Perhaps his pants were too tight. Okay, think, think!

  “Taxi?”

  Tree closed his eyes.

  “Taxi!” Thom yelled and waved his arm at an approaching taxi.