The Shotgun Rule

by Charlie Huston

  He points.

  – The blue flames are rad.

  Paul clicks the box cutter all the way open.

  – We should trash that shit.

  Andy looks at his own piece of shit bike and then at the two works of art.

  – What?

  – We should trash ’em. Teach the Arroyos’ a fuckin’ lesson for stealin’ bikes.

  He takes a step toward the BMX chopper, box cutter in his hand.

  Andy gets in front of him.

  – No, man, leave ’em alone.

  Paul points the cutter at Andy’s bike.

  – Fuck do you care? They would have done that shit to your bike, chopped it up and used it for someone else. ’Cept your bike is so lame they probably only could of used like the sprocket or a couple spokes. They stole your bike, man. Let’s do something about it. Don’t puss out.

  – I’m not pussing, I just. You know, we should just get out anyway, they’re gonna be back.

  – Fuck that. They stole your bike, we’re not going anywhere until we do something about it.

  Paul’s voice is rising, his face turning red.

  Andy sees him wince.

  – You OK?

  Paul closes his eyes.

  He breathes. He turns his back to his friends, lets his mouth drop open, relaxes the muscles in his neck.

  He dreams.

  He’s dreaming about Chargers and GTOs and Mustangs. He’s dreaming about driving. He’s dreaming about the four of them piled into a black ’72 fastback with red detailed louvers over the sloped rear window and a fat yellow racing stripe down the middle of the hood. Dreaming about laying rubber out the exit of the bowling alley. Dreaming about speeding after a European sports car full of fucking jocks and cutting it off and piling out the doors and fucking them up because they can’t just drive away after they scream shit at them on the sidewalk. About nailing chicks in the backseat.

  He’s dreaming about walking out the front door of his house and getting in a badass set of wheels and driving it away and deciding never to go home and no one ever being able to catch him.

  Andy touches Paul’s back.

  – You OK?

  Paul turns and slaps his hand away.

  – Don’t touch me, puss, I’m fucking fine.

  He drops the cutter.

  – So leave the bikes alone, whatever, but I’m robbing these motherfuckers blind.

  And he sets off down the hall toward the bedrooms.

  Andy looks at George and Hector, points at the door.

  – C’mon, guys, we got to get out of here.

  George and Hector look at one another.

  And they follow Paul.

  – Fine. Whatever. I’m getting out of here.

  Andy goes to the window and looks out. The girls are back across the street, playing on the sidewalk. He touches his bike, imagines the havoc if the Arroyos come home with them still in the house. Imagines the feeling if something were to go down without him being there, and then he goes down the hall.

  He watches the doorways as they toss Fernando’s and Ramon’s rooms and sees Hector find the fistfuls of stolen gold and silver chains hidden in the body of a donkey piñata. Sees Paul sweeping Fernando’s dresser top clear of combs and hairnets and bandanas and a small shrine of the Madonna, sees him finding the rolls of singles and fives and tens stuffed to the back of the underwear drawer. He goes back into the hall and opens a door and finds the closet Timo’s been dumping his stuff in and picks through it, taking a single photograph and walking away and pulling open another door and looking into the garage.

  – Hey, guys!

  They all come out into the hall.

  George moves toward the bikes.

  – They back?

  Andy is still looking in the garage.

  – What is this shit?

  George comes over.

  – Oh, fuck.

  Andy looks at him.

  – What is it?

  George looks over his shoulder at Hector and Paul.

  – What’d you think?

  Paul takes a look.

  – Fuck me.

  Hector moves Andy aside so he can see.

  – What? Oh fuck.

  They stare at trash bags spilling hundreds of empty cold and allergy medicine boxes, bottles, and foil packets; at gallon jugs of iodine tincture lined against the wall; heaps of matchboxes with the strike surface cut off; various cans and bottles of acetone, Red Devil Lye, methanol, muriatic acid, and Coleman’s camp fuel. A pingpong table in the middle of the garage is covered with an assortment of PVC fittings, flasks, Pyrex bowls, and pie tins. Baking sheets line a catering table against the wall, and two blow dryers are plugged into sockets next to a toaster oven with a shattered glass front. The row of tiny windows in the garage door are taped over with the same lowrider and skin magazine posters that cover the walls.

  Paul takes a step forward.

  – Fuck. Me.

  George hooks the back of his shirt.

  – C’mon, man, this shit can blow up.

  Andy squeezes past Hector.

  – What is it?

  Paul jerks free of George and looks at the baking sheets, all of them covered in a coarse powder.

  – Looks like the Great Brain doesn’t know it all. It’s a crank lab, man.

  – What?

  George grabs his brother’s shoulder.

  – Stay out of there.

  Andy shrugs him off.

  – Fuck you.

  He goes to Paul, points at the powder on the sheet.

  – That it?

  Paul shakes his head.

  – No, man, that’s like a stage you go through. Jeff told me about it.

  Hector steps into the garage, toes the plastic jugs next to the wall.

  – How’s he know?

  – Working for Security Eye. He was guarding that house out in Springtown for an insurance company, the one that burned down. That was a crank lab that blew up. He talked to a detective or something. Guy told him.

  George steps into the garage.

  – See, the shit blows up, that’s what happened to Richard Pryor.

  – That was freebase, fuckwad.

  – Same thing.

  – No it’s not. Freebase is smoking coke. Crank is crystal meth.

  – Fuck you.

  – Fuck you. I know.

  – I don’t give a fuck what it is, let’s get out.

  Hector whips his new chain at one of the lowrider pinups, ripping it through the middle and leaving a gash on the dirty drywall behind it.

  – Arroyos are dealin’ crank. Bikes must be a fucking hobby.

  Paul rummages in a cardboard box. Dirty kitchen utensils, tangles of rubber bands, newsprint coupons for Mountain Mike’s Pizza, more bits and pieces of bicycles and PVC.

  – Maybe. Might just be making it. Selling to a dealer.

  George is looking at the homemade chemistry set cobbled together on the table.

  – Jesus, they’re making a lot.

  Andy opens a paint smeared Kelvinator refrigerator in the corner.

  – Yeah, they are.

  Paul is fingering a rusty Buck knife with a broken tip, he looks up.

  – What?

  Andy points at the contents of the fridge.

  – They’re making a lot.

  The top shelf of the fridge is loaded with six large Ziploc storage bags, each stuffed full with yellow crystals.

  Hector, about to slash a Oui centerfold, pauses to look.

  – Shit. Holy shit.

  Paul drops the Buck knife and comes over. He picks up one of the bags.

  – Man. Oh, man. Fucking A.

  Andy picks up a bag.

  – How much is this?

  George grabs the bag and puts it back in the fridge.

  – It’s a fucking lot. C’mon, let’s go.

  Paul opens his bag.

  – I don’t know, man. A quarter gram is like this much.

  He holds h
is thumb and index finger about an inch apart.

  – That costs twenty.

  He hefts the bag.

  – This is like, man, gotta be a pound. How many grams in a pound?

  Andy blinks once while his brain arranges the numbers and they appear on the inside of his eyelids. He reads them off.

  – Four hundred fifty three and a half. Well, a little more than a half. Like point five nine and change.

  – Four hundred fifty three, point five nine and change times four?

  – Eighteen hundred fourteen, point three six.

  Paul licks his lips.

  – And that times twenty?

  – Thirty six thousand two hundred eighty seven, point two.

  Paul squeezes the bag, it rustles, and the crystals crunch.

  – That’s a car, man. That’s the most bitchin’ car ever. Fuck, man, that’s four decent cars.

  George takes the big bag from Paul and hands it to Andy.

  – Put everything back like it was, man. This is not a car. It’s fucking crank and you have to sell it to get the money to buy the car and you don’t know how to sell it and you get busted and end up in Santa Rita playing bitch to some fuckstick like Ramon.

  – Fuck you, man. What’s easier than selling drugs? Your aunt deals pills. She does OK.

  Andy finishes arranging the bags and steps back.

  – That’s it.

  George looks.

  – You sure? It looks different.

  – Maybe move that one on the end to the right a little.

  George pushes the bags around. Hector’s found a can of WD40 and is using it to loosen up his chain.

  Andy looks at his brother’s back, nudges Paul with his elbow.

  Paul gives him a shove.

  – Knock it off, fag.

  Andy rolls his eyes, nudges him again.

  Paul raises a hand to give him a slap.

  – What did I just fucking?

  He sees the bag of crank Andy is holding behind his back.

  George closes the fridge and turns.

  – That shit’s more trouble than it’s worth. I told you that story about that guy.

  He has told them the story. They’ve all heard the story from last summer when he was making pill runs for aunt Amy.

  He was dropping a vial of ludes with a guy who needed them to come down. A crankhead who’d been binging for like a week. George went in the guy’s apartment and the guy wouldn’t let him go.

  George was still freaked hours later when he told them the story.

  The guy just kept fucking talking shit and spazzing out and making me play Monopoly. Wouldn’t let me be the dog like I always am, didn’t want to be the dog himself, he was the fucking racecar, kept going Zoomzoomzoom, but I couldn’t be the dog. Just played and played and kept talking about nothing, just spewing shit and just when it seemed like he was winding down I’d make a move toward the door and the guy would do another couple lines and start jumping around and get pissed if I tried to leave the kitchen. Guy finally went bankrupt and started crying and saying that he lost everything and he was gonna kill himself and went to the closet to get a gun he said he had and I shoved the guy in the closet and slammed the door and ran the fuck out of the place. Told aunt Amy that’s it, man, no more fucking crankheads. Rather drop a bag of bennies at a biker party than do another lude run for a crankhead.

  And he’s been down on crank ever since.

  Paul holds up a hand.

  – OK, man, whatever.

  Through the garage door they hear a car pull into the driveway, the sound of Fernando screaming at his younger brothers, then the two of them screaming back at him as “Beat It” blares from the Impala’s stereo.

  Paul makes a face.

  – Fucking Michael Jackson.

  By the time the Arroyos are coming in the front door the guys have run out the back with their bikes, thrown them over the rear neighbor’s fence, and gone over after them. Their pockets crammed with the money, jewelry, a bag of loose joints from Timo’s stash, a pearl handled switchblade, a box of Trojans, and a few copies of Oui. Paul with the bag of crank he’s taken from Andy shoved down the back of his pants.

  By the time the Arroyos have stopped screaming at each other and Fernando has broken Timo’s nose for being a smartass and squared off with Ramon in a no holds barred fistfight that has Timo hiding behind the legless couch, by the time the fight is over and Timo has gone for a doobie to kill the pain of his throbbing nose and found everything trashed and told his brothers and they’ve run to the garage and found that a half kilo of crank is missing and Ramon has gone for his little chrome.22 automatic, by that time the guys have cleared the neighbor’s yard, ridden to the Senior Taco in the P amp;X shopping center, and ordered sixteen tacos with fries and milkshakes.

  They know being a rat sucks, but the Arroyos are gonna know who robbed them and if they don’t do something those crazy fuckers will. Paul’s ready to do it. It was his idea they rob the place, if someone has to rat the Arroyos, it’s him.

  But as they’re talking and waiting for their food, Andy gets up and makes the call. Not that he still wants revenge for the stolen bike he’s leaned against the phone booth, but he does want to make the call himself. He just can’t help it. Finding the school picture of Alexandra when he was digging through Timo’s shit was too much; the little photo clipped from a large sheet of them; Te quiero, Timo written in the corner in red ballpoint, in her own hand.

  So he dials 0 and asks for the cops and anonymously reports a disturbance at 1367 North P Street. Some kind of fight or something.

  The cops know that address. Small town heat that they are, they like nothing more than to bust the chops of the local spic hooligans. So they send a couple cars right over there.

  Paul has just grabbed the last taco from the pile in the middle of the table and peeled off the grease stained orange paper and crunched into the taco, biting it in half, when a few blocks away the cops arrive at the Arroyos’ just in time to see Ramon stepping out the front door, tucking the bright silver.22 into his waistband.

  They don’t bother telling him to drop it.

  The Sketchy House

  They roll their bikes up the driveway as if they live there, Paul flipping his new Buck knife open with the edge of his thumb the way Jeff showed him, the razor edged blade slicing clean through the hank of yellow rope, the crooked gate creaking open on rusted hinges before creaking closed behind them.

  George loops one of the loose rope ends around the gatepost to keep it from swinging open. He peeks through a wide crack between the gate’s warped planks and watches the street. No one comes out on their front porch to gaze across the street. No bright lights shine out from the cracks between curtains as someone looks from their kitchen window. The street is TV time quiet. Everyone parked in front of the tube watching Magnum P.I.

  He turns around. Andy is lining up the bikes, turning them so they face the gate, enough room between them so that they can all jump on and start riding without being on top of each other.

  Paul is at the side door. He turns the knob. Shakes his head. George joins him. The window peeking into the garage is covered on the inside. Tinfoil and black duct tape.

  Hector has gone around the rear corner of the house, trying the back windows for one that’s unlocked.

  He stays low so the tall crest of his mohawk can’t be seen from any of the other backyards. The guys wanted him to wear a cap or something over it. Fuck that. Thing takes almost as long to do as his sister’s hair. Besides, these old houses off Junction Avenue have huge yards and tons of big trees that are like a hundred years old or something. No one is gonna see shit. What the guys really wanted was for him to cut it off. They’re uptight that if someone gets a look at them going in or out the mohawk is gonna get them all busted. Sure, there’s only a couple other guys in town that got ’em. And he’s the only Mexican. But that’s the point. Looking different is the point. Having your appearance spit in people’
s faces and piss them off is the point. Cut off the hawk and it’s like caving in. Fuck that.

  And where the fuck’s an unlocked window for fucksake?

  He’s checked the whole back of the house, tried the kitchen and bedroom and livingroom windows and they’re all locked. Normally, you could slip a jimmy into the crack between the sliding glass door and the jamb, but the owners have a piece of 1×2 laid flat in the door’s guide slot or whatever the hell it’s called. Pop the lock and try to open the door and it’ll just get jammed against the stick.

  And, man, it’s a mess in there. Boxes and shit piled all over. Stuff that just looks like garbage. A shitty old couch and a lamp. Not even a TV. What kind of stuff they supposed to find in a place like this?

  Fuck it. Not his problem.

  He peeks around the corner into the narrow space that runs between the far side of the house and the fence. One of those little louvered bathroom windows is cranked open. He goes back around the other side of the house and gets the guys.

  He tells them what the deal is, and they all look at Andy.

  Andy keeps his hands in his pockets, his right hand fingering the twenty sided die.

  The Worst Thing That Happens

  Bob Whelan stands at the foot of the stairs, sipping coffee and looking up at the door to his older son’s room. He thinks about going up and kicking the foot of George’s bed and getting his lazy ass up and dressed and out to the job site with him. Been weeks since the kid’s come out for a day’s work. It’d do him good to get out there and make a couple bucks instead of screwing around with his pals all day.

  Cindy shuffles into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes and yawning. Barely looking at what she’s doing, she gets a mug from the cabinet, fills it with coffee, rips open two packets of Sweet’N Low, dumps them in the mug, pours in a drop of milk and stirs it with her index finger before taking a big swallow.

  She looks at Bob at the bottom of the stairs.

  – You should go get him.

  He shrugs.

  – Not gonna force him to make money he doesn’t want to make.

  She reaches under the XL T that reaches halfway down her thighs and scratches her stomach.