Run (2 page)

Not that I don’t like the Glock 19. It’s my weapon of choice. Right about now I’m carrying two of them: one out in the glove compartment of my Mustang, the other one tight to the flat of my back, snug in a Bianchi holster.

Nice construction on the Glock. It’s the original polymer pistol; some folks, the dumb ones, thought you could walk it through airport security. The G19 is compact, weighs thirty ounces loaded with a fifteen-round magazine, and the trigger pulls as smooth as taffy. Maybe it’s just the cough that bothers me. Hearing it when it’s not my own. That annoys me. Like shooting one of the Beretta 80s, those little .22s that sort of spit when you squeeze them. Or the MAC-10: On full auto, sounds like a cat pissing.

I used to like my weapons loud. Let’s face it, when the shit goes down, so deep that it’s time to shoot—well then, you ought to make a statement. The old Springfield 1911A1, standard-issue Army .45, spoke up with a bull roar, scared the shit out of anybody, anything. Which was helpful, since it’s a bitch for anyone but a pro to score hits with old Slab Sides from more than about twenty feet. But that four-five talks like it looks: big and mean. I keep mine in a footlocker, way up in the attic, with a pair of my old fatigues, a picture of my high school sweetheart—
that bitch—and a map of the provinces. That’s where it belongs: put to rest, another buried dream.

Don’t even think about it, I tell myself, and then I say it aloud to Renny Two Hand, who’s finally fallen out of the beer-and-babe fugue and noticed that something’s going down. He looks from the asshole on the dance floor to me and then down to the cuff of his right pants leg, which no doubt hides a heavy something with a barrel and a trigger and, if I know Two Hand, a high-capacity magazine. I snag his jacket, ready to hustle our happy asses to the fire exit and out of this nonsense. Trouble is something you just never need.

So through the huddle comes this well-armed asshole from the outland, Manassas maybe, wearing torn jeans, standard-issue black Metallica T-shirt, a flannel overshirt, and about five too many beers. He shakes his sloppy blond head and slow-dances back into the jukebox. That band with the dead guy—now I remember, it’s called Nirvana—starts singing in double time. Little wrestling around, then cue the scream. So the asshole’s got a Glock. Full magazine, maybe, and he’s shot one time. Could be lots of bodies rolled out of the place by Springfield EMS, but that one’s beyond Vegas odds; no way he’s serious. Drunks are rarely serious about anything but fighting or fucking, and like most drunks this asshole isn’t much capable of either.

By now the piece is pointed at the linoleum. The first of the bouncers, a skull-shaven Marine probably moonlighting out of Quantico, makes his appearance, gives him the old okeydokey take-it-easy routine. Hands up, smile and a nod, smile and a nod, one step closer, one step more.

The jarhead gestures to the ceiling and when the asshole looks up—told you he was an asshole—the Marine whales him with what the boxing announcers like to call a solid right to the jaw. Down and out for the count. Stick a fork in him, this one’s done.

I look over at the table where the commotion started and there’s another spud there, another black T-shirt, another flannel shirt, another pair of jeans, and he’s looking at his left thigh like it just sprouted an eye and winked at him. He’s saying oh momma oh momma and wiping blood back and forth in his hands like it’s grease.

I look at my watch, which reads nigh on one in the morning. Last
call for blood and alcohol. A black-and-white ought to be wheeling around any minute now. So:

Th-th-that’s all, folks.

Ren, I say, let’s call it a night.

Yeah, he says. A night.

He pulls back the last of his Bud Light and shrugs himself up off the bar stool. It’s hard to believe he can walk.

I drop a fiver on the bar for dearest Shawnee, she shakes her tits at me, and we’re gone.

Sucking cold air on the blacktop parking lot, shaking out the smell of cigarettes, I’m taken with one of those
Twilight Zone
thoughts, and this time it’s the idea that, while we were being entertained, the mighty suburb of Springfield, Virginia, slid into a deep black hole. Then I realize the power is out along Backlick Road and its rat maze of mini-malls. And how much I hate the dark.

I steer Renny toward the Mustang. A couple beers, that’s all. The age-old promise, man-to-man. So we had a couple beers, did our business, traded the keys, and seven p.m. rolled into nine, and we had a couple beers again, and round about eleven the bottles and the dollar bills formed up ranks on the counter. A nice drunk, until the coughing fit.

I try to remind Renny about Thursday, about why we traded the keys, but he’s giving me the Ren routine, hands waving out at nothing in particular, clearing the cobwebs, no doubt searching for the clever exit line. An unshaven and gimp-kneed Shakespearean. All the world’s barrooms and parking lots are a stage.

Ah, the smell of blood after midnight, he finally tells me and the parking lot and the black, black sky and the red-and-blue lights of the police car whirlybirding down Franconia Road toward us. It’s the smell of—

There isn’t a pause; it’s a gap. His face goes loose, and he takes a long look back at the Dauphine Steak House like he’s left his best friend, which is me, inside. The silence doesn’t stop. I stand there until it’s just too much.

The smell of … what? I ask him.

His face comes back at me, a full moon that shines on with nothingness. Then:

You drive, he tells me. He hooks his fingers into his belt, hoists his jeans, and wobbles on to the car.

That’s my partner, Reynolds James—aka Renny, aka Two Hand, aka The Wrap—for you: Always starting something but never getting it done.

How did you sleep? Mom asks me.

Like a rock, I tell her. It’s almost nine and I’m working my way through the kitchen cabinets, looking for the instant coffee and the Advil.

Any more of those dreams? Those nightmares?

Not this time, I say. It’s a wonder what eight or ten bottles of Bud Light can do for your dreams. Sleep was a chalkboard, dusty and blank. The last thing I remember is dropping my pants on the floor and falling face first into the sheets. Though maybe I kissed Fiona.

Good night, I said. Maybe to Fiona, after the kiss. Definitely to Mom, by the time I get to the last cabinet.

You’re drinking again. An observation, nothing too judgmental; no kind of tsk-tsk, oh my, please don’t do that. Just a friendly reminder. But those reminders tend to get your back up.

Yeah, I tell her, in my head. You want to let that twitch of annoyance ride. You want to hold to the truth of what people say, not to the reason they say it. Or something like that. I heard this on the radio.

I find the freeze-dried but not the Advil. I zap a mug of water in the microwave and stir in the coffee. Then I dry-swallow some Dexedrine.

Mom doesn’t blink. She never does.

It’s a pretty nice photograph, a snapshot taken by one of my cousins at some family reunion or wedding; maybe it was a funeral, I don’t know. I never went to those things when Mom was alive, and I don’t go to them now. Maybe I don’t want to end up in a photograph on somebody’s mantelpiece. A strange kind of shadow hooks down into her cheek, but still, it’s nice. She’s smiling, and I like that.

The newspaper says
VIRGINIA HANDGUN LIMIT LOOKS UNSTOPPABLE
. But that’s page three. To get there, I’ve read about the new income tax increase, the new fuel tax increase, the new cigarette tax increase, the new prime interest rate increase, and the new dead bodies over in D.C., thirteen of them in this particular twenty-four-hour go-round. The Reverend Gideon Parks has called for a prayer vigil on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but the Mayor doesn’t want prayers, he wants more cops. I’ve finished the first cup of coffee and started on the second by the time Fiona wanders in, dropping a pair of high heels to the floor and mounting up, all the while pulling a brush through that long and curly-kinky hair.

Hi, Mom, she says. Reminding me that it’s not really normal to hold conversations with photographs.

Damn if she doesn’t look nice this morning. Silk blouse. Those jeans have got her butt up and she’s doing that thing with the eyeliner again.

Her name is Ellen. About everyone she knows calls her that, although on occasion one of her girlfriends will call her Elfie.

I call her Fiona. I don’t know why. Maybe I just like the name.

She has mud-brown eyes and this little smile that says she knows your number. And she does. She looks good in anything, better without.

I got my period, she says.

What do you say to that? Sorry? Congratulations? I drink my coffee instead.

I said—

Heard you, I tell her.

She tosses the hairbrush down, sweeps her purse and car keys from the Formica counter, gives my forehead an aunt’s kiss, and tells me not to forget the dishes and that we’re short of milk. Then:

Bye.

It’s Tuesday, the last week of April. Fiona works Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at the Vachon Hair Salon in Rosslyn, right across the river from Georgetown. She does manicures, nail designs. Fridays she leaves work at noon and doesn’t come home until Sunday, just in time for
60 Minutes
. I don’t know what she does when she’s away. She’s never told me, and I’ve never asked. Things are easier that way.

I started to follow her one time. I don’t know what got into me. Boredom, maybe, or one of those men things: property, territory, mine mine mine. I borrowed a company car, a beat-up station wagon that was less obvious than dirt, and tailed her silver CRX and its
JAZZERCISE
bumper sticker all the way up the GW Parkway to the Chain Bridge. Right about there I felt like one sorry jerk, and I turned the wagon toward Tysons Corner on Route 123. Drove out to Bloomingdale’s and bought her some perfume, little ounce of Cartier Panthère that cost over a hundred bucks. Buying off shame does not come cheap.

I don’t tell her my secrets, so why should she tell me hers? Things like that have to work both ways, or they don’t work at all.

That Sunday night, while Morley Safer tried to speak wisely with some withered refugee from Afghanistan, I handed her the perfume and she told me that I shouldn’t have done it and all that, but she smiled.

Fiona smiles a lot. She’s the happiest person I know. Her voice is like whiskey, rough and smooth all at once. So are her kisses.

When I wake up in the night, sometimes she’s holding on to me.

You should know right now, if you haven’t figured it out yet, that I’m not the good guy.

The name is Burdon: Burdon Lane. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in Jewish Hospital, though it was the doctors, not the parents, who were Jewish. Grew up somewhere else—in southern Illinois—which pretty much sums up my childhood: It was there but now it’s somewhere else. It was the fifties, so that makes me—what? Forty-going-on-old. Brown hair, blue eyes. Six feet and some tall, one hundred eighty pounds. Social Security Number? Yeah, I got one. Actually, I got more than one.

Here’s my ad in the
PERSONALS
section: SWM, mid-40s, divorced, no kids, ISO guns. Big guns, little guns. Handguns, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and, yeah, okay, grenade launchers and antitank weapons here and there along the way. Then again, here’s my card: Burdon Lane. Executive Vice President. UniArms, Incorporated.

I’m a businessman, and tucked in the inside chest pocket of my suit coat, the grey linen three-button off-the-rack job, is the reason I met with Renny Two Hand last night: a key, the kind of key you see on most everyone’s key chain, the kind of key that fits the front door or the office door or the mailbox at the apartment.

This particular key fits into a padlock. The padlock hangs on the
door of a self-storage rental unit on the third floor of Moving Vault on Eisenhower Avenue in Alexandria. Inside the rental unit is a stack of boxes whose contents, for the most part, are noted on the sides of the cartons in blue Magic Marker. Inside the third box from the bottom, marked
DEHUMIDIFIER/BABY CLOTHES/CARRY-ON BAG
, are a dehumidifier, baby clothes, and … a grey Samsonite carry-on bag.

On Thursday I will visit the storage unit and I will take a grey Samsonite carry-on bag with me. I will open the third cardboard box. I will put my carry-on bag, which is empty, inside the box and I will leave with the carry-on bag from the box. I will drive to the Huntington Metro Station and park in the open-air lot. I will board the Metro, ride the Yellow Line to Gallery Place, where I will change to the Red Line and ride on to Union Station. There I will board Amtrak Train 120, a Metroliner departing at 4:00 p.m., and I will have a cup of coffee and read my book for a couple hours until I reach 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. There I will disembark from the train and I will take a taxicab to a fine seafood restaurant called Bookbinder’s, a very busy, hectic place on Walnut between Second and Front, where, still wearing my sunglasses, I will give my raincoat and my carry-on bag to the coat-check girl and I will receive a plastic chit in return, round, with a hole for a hanger and an identifying number embossed in gold. I will meet an old girlfriend of mine, a classified ad supervisor for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
named Lauren Auster, at the bar, and we will have drinks and we will tell stories, some old and some new, and we will laugh, and after a time we will move to a table and we will order shrimp cocktail and Caesar salad and the scrod, with mine blackened and hers grilled in light butter and dill, and at 7:15 p.m. I will put my napkin to my lips and I will announce the need to visit the men’s room. There I will enter the second stall, waiting for my turn if I have to, and I will drop my pants and I will have a seat and I will do my business. I will open a package of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum and I will chew one piece until the flavor is gone. I will take the plastic chit from my pocket and I will take the gum from my mouth and I will press the gum to the chit and then stick the chit to the wall behind the toilet. I will roll off some paper, dry my hands, flush the toilet, and buckle up. I will walk back to my table, finish the scrod, have a Martell Cordon Bleu, have a cup of coffee,
and when the tab arrives I will pay with cash and leave a decent tip, and before eight I will leave with my arm around Lauren and she will finish telling me about her latest boyfriend and we will share a kiss and a hug and then we will find our separate ways home. Which means that I will take a taxicab back to 30th Street Station and catch Amtrak Train 127, the last southbound Metroliner of the day, which departs at 8:14 p.m.