The Shotgun Rule

by Charlie Huston

  – If you want his company all you have to do is ask.

  Bob walks away from the stairs.

  – Not about wanting his company. Doesn’t matter. He’d rather mess around with Paul and Hector.

  She picks up the coffee pot and tops off his cup for him.

  – So take Andy. Andy would love to go.

  He rolls his eyes.

  – Honey, if you’d been there the time I took him. That kid on a construction site is like the opposite of a bull in a china shop. Thought he was gonna kill himself, wandering around daydreaming.

  – So give him a broom and have him sweep some stuff up.

  – It’s not like that. Can’t just stand off to the side. You have to be on the ball and pay attention to what’s going on around you. He’ll be out there sweeping and thinking about math problems and Dungeons amp; Dragons and whatever else and end up under a grader or something.

  – Take them both. George can keep an eye on Andy and you can spend some time with both of them.

  Bob’s cup bangs on the counter when he sets it down.

  – I’m not trying to arrange quality time with my sons, Cin. I was just thinking George should be working a little more this summer and fucking around a little less. OK?

  Cindy shakes her head and starts for the bedroom.

  – Fine, Bob, whatever you say. I’ve got to get dressed for work. You want to wait a few minutes I’ll make you some breakfast.

  – I’ll get something from the cater truck.

  – Suit yourself.

  He watches her disappear down the hall, looking at her legs, the bruises on her thighs from where she’s banged them against the checkout counter at Safeway where she spends her days at the cash register.

  He thinks about what it would be like if his wife didn’t have to work. His mom never had to work. Well, she worked plenty on the ranch, but she never had to go and take a job outside the house. Not till pop lost the ranch anyway.

  Could have been different.

  He stares into his coffee cup and thinks about what he could have done to make it different.

  – Hell with that.

  He walks to the front hall, sits on the little bench Cindy found at a yard sale and stripped and sanded and stained so it would look nice in the house. He sets his cup down, pulls on one of his scuffed steel toes and laces it up.

  Things could have been different. Doesn’t mean they would have been better. Not for him. Not for Cindy. Not for the boys.

  He stands and stretches and tries to remember how much gas is in the truck and whether he has any cash in his wallet to fill it up.

  – Hey.

  He looks at Cindy, coming toward him in her bikini pants and bra, running a brush through her hair, Andy’s cesarean scar across her stomach, a good looking woman.

  She taps the brush against his arm.

  – I’m just saying, you could tell George you want him to come with you. It doesn’t have to be a contest to see who says something first.

  – It’s not a contest.

  – Well you sure act like it is. Both of you.

  – Cin, the boy is getting older. I’d like to see him making some decisions on his own that don’t involve riding his bike to the bowling alley or copping a few extra bucks so he can get someone to buy him a six pack.

  She reaches up and loops her arm around his neck.

  – Just because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, that doesn’t mean it’ll grow the same way.

  He pulls out from under her arm.

  – What? Where the hell did that one come from? That a Hallmark card?

  – You know what I mean. Even if he’s like you, you worked out just fine.

  He looks at the wall, the series of pencil marks that rise up it, charting the growth of his sons.

  – I got lucky.

  He goes out the front door.

  – Almost through with that?

  Paul doesn’t look up, just folds the newspaper and places it on the table in front of his father’s chair.

  Mr. Cheney pours himself a cup from the Mr. Coffee.

  – Don’t have to give me the whole thing. Finish reading what you were reading.

  Paul gets up and takes his cereal bowl and spoon to the sink and washes them and puts them on the dish rack. He picks up his own coffee cup from the table and starts for the kitchen door.

  His dad is at the table, fingering the corner of the front page.

  – You got in late last night.

  Paul stops.

  – Ya huh.

  – Out with the guys?

  – Ya huh.

  – How are they?

  – I’uh nuh.

  Mr. Cheney takes a sip from his cup.

  – What are you doing today?

  Paul stands in the doorway, back to his father, shrugs.

  – Summer almost over. Got any big plans?

  Another shrug.

  – Never see the guys anymore. Used to play over here all the time.

  Paul walks.

  – My head hurts. Goin’ to my room.

  Mr. Cheney moves to the door.

  – Need anything?

  Paul keeps walking. His father watches him disappear down the hall, then sits at the table and waits.

  He hears it when Paul slips past the kitchen and into the garage, hears the automatic door swing up, and knows his son has ridden off on the bike he bought him for his sixteenth birthday in lieu of the car he really wanted.

  He gets up and goes to the cabinet next to the refrigerator and squats to reach behind the stack of newspapers Paul hasn’t taken to the curb for recycling in weeks, and takes out the jug of Delacort brandy hidden there. He holds it up and checks the level against the mark he made on the label last night. No change. He takes the bottle to the sink, pours half his coffee down the drain and replaces it with brandy, makes a fresh mark on the label and puts the bottle back behind the papers.

  He swirls the coffee and brandy and takes a drink. Need to pick up a new bottle today. The Liquor Barn in Pleasanton this time. Haven’t been there in a few weeks. Not that he’s got anything to hide. Just nobody’s business how he lives his life.

  Unfolding the paper, knuckling his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose, he reads the story about Ramon Arroyo being shot in the leg by police and he and his brothers being busted on an assortment of charges: stolen goods, drugs, weapons, resisting arrest.

  Good lord.

  He thinks about Caesar Arroyo, the boys’ father. The squat bundle of calluses and muscle that he used to see swatting his boys’ ears at soccer games when they didn’t play up to his standards.

  He’d tried to have a word with the man once. Walked over to him on the sideline and smiled and suggested to him that his boys might play better, have a better time if they didn’t feel quite so much pressure. Caesar had stared at him, then waved one of his boys over. Ramon? Fernando? How long ago was this? Could it have been the youngest one? The one Paul had that trouble with?

  The boy had come over and, staring Kyle Cheney in the eye, Caesar had slapped the boy hard. And stood there waiting until Kyle walked away, back to the adjoining field where Paul and George’s team was playing.

  Bob Whelan had been there. He’d seen what Caesar was doing and looked away. He could have done something about it. Whelan is the kind of man who could have said something to Arroyo and made him think twice about knocking his kids around like that. At least made him stop doing it out on the soccer fields where the other kids saw it and got freaked out. But he didn’t do anything. Just like most people. Most adults just don’t have the kids’ best interest at heart.

  Any wonder the Arroyos have grown up like they have? A drug lab. Here. In his town. When do these things happen? How do they happen? Don’t people know they have to monitor their children? Care for them? Love them? Otherwise, things like this happen.

  Tragedies. Family tragedies.

  He gets up, tops off his cup again. Marks the bottle. The
n goes down the hall to his son’s room.

  He fingers the Master Lock Paul mounted there last year. He takes out the duplicate key he had made the afternoon he was doing laundry and found Paul’s key, forgotten in the pocket of his dirty jeans. He opens the lock and goes into his son’s room and sits on the bed.

  He remembers the room as it was, before it became plastered with posters of Iron Maiden and Van Halen and Ozzy Osbourne and Ted Nugent and AC/DC and The Scorpions and Judas Priest and all the others dripping blood and wrapped in Spandex and surrounded by skulls. He remembers when the floor was littered with Legos and Lincoln Logs instead of microwave burrito wrappers and empty matchbooks and torn copies of Rolling Stone and crushed beer cans pushed under the bed and discarded cigarette pack cellophanes. He remembers this room before it smelled of spilled beer and smoke and the stale incense that’s meant to cover it all up.

  He gets up, takes a long drink, sets his coffee cup on top of the dresser and starts to search the room, just as he does every day.

  An empty half pint of Fleischmann’s vodka and the same old stash of Playboy back issues with Bob Whelan’s address label on the cover.

  Booze and dirty magazines. Kyle Cheney knows there’s worse somewhere.

  When Paul first started changing, when his mother took off and left them alone six years ago and he started talking back, that’s when he’d had to start this. She’d driven a wedge between him and his son. That’s what he couldn’t forgive her for. Not the stupid way she left them, but the things she’d said to the boy, the things she’d said about him. Things she’d screamed that scared Paul. Things Paul was just too young to understand.

  Things that confused him about their relationship.

  What it was.

  What it meant to him.

  When he started finding the boy’s door blocked, a dresser shoved in front of it, that’s when he knew the extent of the damage she’d done. The damage she’d done to their trust.

  Paul stopped talking to him. And he’d had no choice but to take things into his own hands, to find out what his son was up to.

  And he found things. A few joints. Pills. A boom box and someone’s class ring, both obviously stolen. Girls sneaking in the window in the middle of the night. Girls he’d seen, and heard. Stood in the hall outside the boy’s room and heard them.

  But it wasn’t enough. None of it was enough to make him feel like he was still inside his son’s life.

  He just had to keep looking. Keep looking until he found the secret that would open his son back up to him.

  Hector wakes up, reaches for his turntable and hits play.

  The tone arm jerks and drops heavily onto the album that’s cued up and waiting to start his day. The speakers hiss and crack and then explode into “Memories of Tomorrow.”

  The sound yanks him from bed and he pogos around the room, flailing his arms and bouncing off the walls.

  Suicidal Tendencies got it right.

  The Pistols were a great start. Dead Kennedys and Black Flag carried him for awhile. He thought it might be the Bad Brains that did it for him. But it was Suicidal Tendencies that took it all the way. He heard about them after taking the bus to Hayward and riding the BART train into San Francisco for a Kennedys gig at Mabuhay Garden. He had to wait another month for the album to come out. It was worth it. It’s perfect and he’s been listening to nothing else ever since.

  He jumps on his bed, jumps from it to the twin his little brothers sleep on, bounces back and forth between them. The little fuckers must be up already. Up and outside, fighting with each other and talking back to their mom. Little pieces of shit.

  Alexandra opens the door.

  – Turn it down!

  He bounces high off the bed and lands in front of her, smiling and jumping up and down.

  – What?

  – Turn it down, Hector, it’s awful! Turn it down.

  He pogos higher, arms plastered to his sides, leaping.

  – Turn it up?

  – Down! Down!

  – Louder?

  – Heeeectoooor! Stooooop iiiiiiit! It’s awwwwwfuuuuuul!

  He grabs her hands and drags her into his room, pulls her up on the bed and bounces.

  – Dance, mija, dance to the music!

  She tries to jerk free.

  – Noooo, it’s not dancing! It’s not music! It’s awful!

  He wraps his arms around her, bouncing, laughing.

  – Dance with me, little sister.

  – Moooooom! Muuuuuhhoooooom!

  But she’s jumping with him now, her perfectly blownout hair mussed, her sharply creased khakis wrinkled, heavy eye liner smeared by tears as she laughs at her crazy big brother.

  He lets her go and they jump up and down on the bed.

  Their mom comes in.

  – Mijo!

  He flies off the bed and crashes off the wall, the record skips once, plays on.

  He dances.

  His mom puts her hands on his shoulders and tries to push him down, to stop the bouncing.

  – Mijo! So loud! So loud!

  But she can’t stop him. She’s laughing.

  – Mijo, no, it’s too early. Come eat breakfast. Turn it off! Come eat.

  He bounces to the turntable, lands, thrashes his head back and forth at the end of the song and takes the needle off the record, becoming still.

  Alexandra climbs off the bed, running a fingertip under her eye.

  – Hectooor, you ruin my makeup. Mooom, look at my face.

  She runs out the door and into the bathroom, where she’ll spend the next hour redoing her hair and makeup.

  Their mom is still laughing.

  – You look like a dancing fish, mijo. A fish.

  He smiles.

  – C’mon, Ma.

  He puts the needle back down on the beginning of the song, bounces back to her and grabs her hands, pulling.

  She jumps up and down a few times with him, then frees her hands and covers her ears.

  – Enough, mijo, enough! Too loud. Come eat.

  She reaches out and grabs a fold of his belly skin between her thumb and index finger and gives it a twist.

  – Eat!

  He bounces free and moshes around the tiny room.

  She waves her hands in the air and walks away, still laughing, the song thundering and ripping new cracks in the taped up speakers.

  Through the open door he watches her walk back to the kitchen, where she spends her life minding pots of rice and beans and stewed pork and chicken.

  His dad is in the livingroom, asleep on the couch already, his ruined leg propped on a kitchen chair, a bottle of his painkillers sticking out of his bathrobe pocket, a half empty gallon jug of Gallo on the floor.

  Hector pushes the door closed and dances, slashing his hand up and down over the strings of an invisible guitar. The guitar he’ll have one day when high school is over and he takes BART into The City for the last time.

  He’ll crash in a squat full of punks and put together a band and play that guitar when they gig at Mabuhay and he’ll take it on the road and he’ll see shit that he’s never gonna see if he takes a job at the quarry and marries one of the pachuco chicks from the neighborhood and has three kids by the time he’s old enough to go in a bar. Fuck that. He’s gonna buy a guitar and be a fucking punk.

  He is a fucking punk.

  And he sings.

  Mass starvation

  Contaminated water

  Destroyed cities

  Mutilated bodies

  I’ll kill myself

  I’d rather die

  If you could see the future

  You’d know why.

  It’s hot in George’s attic room. All summer long he wakes up sweating. Today he wakes up sweating and screaming, having dreamed the El Camino running him over.

  He sits on the edge of the bed, sweat coating his scalp under his long hair and running from his pits and down his sides, soaking the seat of his Fruit of the Looms. He gets up and
goes to the mirror over his desk and looks at the scrapes running from his jaw down the left side of his neck.

  When he and Andy came home yesterday he told their folks he pulled an endo on a jump at the firebreak. His dad asked if his bike was in one piece while his mom cleaned the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. Andy had gone straight to his room.

  You don’t want Andy around when you’re lying to mom and dad. Little spaz gets restless and starts talking too much and fucks it up.

  But it wasn’t a big deal. Mom was relieved it was nothing that required a trip to the emergency room. Dad was satisfied that the bike wasn’t messed up. But he gave one of his speeches: Got to value the things money buys, the hard work that goes into making that money. You’ll need that. You’re not gonna be getting a scholarship anywhere like your little brother, you’re gonna be working for a living. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with you. That’s the way it is. Life’s not fair. Sooner you learn the truth that work sucks and working for someone else sucks even worse, the better. Got to put value on what you earn when you hate doing what you have to do to get it.

  Big Bob Whelan, saying it like it is. Again. Telling him that everything has a cost. There’s no free rides and life’s not fair and there’s always assholes wherever you go. Work, work, work and get by and take a break on weekends and crack a beer and watch a game and show your kids how to mow a lawn and drywall a house and shovel rocks and play hard and there’s no such thing as second place winner and be nice to your wife and she’ll be nice to you and don’t take anything for granted and clean your plate and as long as you live under my roof you live under my rules and there’s no such thing as a free ride and if it ain’t easy that just means you should work a little harder, doesn’t it?

  The lesson of life: You get what you work for, if that.

  George turns from the mirror and goes to the bathroom at the foot of the stairs. He gets in the shower and blasts it cold to stop the sweat. He should have brought his jeans down with him, his jeans and the Aerosmith Toys in the Attic T he plans on wearing today. Getting dressed up there, he’ll just start to sweat again. He thinks about the money from yesterday, wonders if there’s enough to buy an air conditioner for his room, a window unit. No. His dad would want to know where he got that much cash. But a fan, he could probably get away with a fan.