The Last Tomorrow (2 page)

‘I think it’s time for you to leave, friend.’

‘You cheating bastard, do you know who I am?’

‘I don’t care if your name is Jesus Humphrey Christ, you
gotta leave.’

‘You have no idea who you’re fucking with.’

‘Theodore Stuart, a numbers cruncher for James “the Man” Manning who thinks just because he works for someone with
some pull, that means he has some pull hisself. Well, your boss don’t have as much pull on this coast as you seem to think he does, and even if he did he don’t have no pull with me, and
even if he did have pull with me you ain’t him. Far as I can tell, you’re just a fat drunk who can count money okay, but can’t seem to hold onto any hisself.’ He licks his
lips. ‘Now, all this conversation is stimulating, I admit, but I got a job to do, which means you gotta leave. Get to it, friend.’

‘Take the gun off me.’

Teddy knows the night is over, knows he must subtract himself from this situation, but something in him refuses to budge while the dealer has the gun on him. He will have this one small victory.
He will walk out of here with a little dignity. He will not walk out of here with his shoulders slumped, with his gaze on the floor, watching his feet drag him into the night. He will not walk out
of here hating himself. The kid will take the gun off him or Teddy will not move. Not an inch.

Not a goddamned inch.

‘No.’

‘Take the gun off me and I’ll go.’

‘You’ll go anyway, friend. I’m the one at the trigger end of this weapon.’

Herb Boykin, this place’s owner, wearing a well-tailored suit and a hand-painted tie, is staring at them from across the room. Teddy can see him over the kid’s shoulder. Can see him
rock back on his heels with his hands in his pockets. Can see him suck on an eyetooth. Can see him rock forward. Can see him walk toward them.

‘What’s going on here, Francis?’ he says as he arrives. ‘Mr Stuart’s out past his bedtime.’

‘You’re making the other patrons nervous.’
‘Tell em to relax. I only hit what I’m aiming at.’ He says this without taking his eyes off Teddy. Then he says: ‘Are you gonna leave, friend?’

‘Take the gun off
me.’

‘Back away and it’ll be off you.’

‘Shotguns are less than – uh – discriminatory, Francis.’

‘It’s pushed against his forehead, sir. I ain’t gonna miss.’ Teddy can feel tears welling
in his eyes. Fifty years old and tears welling in his eyes over an altercation with a kid barely out of high school. But he refuses to lose this battle completely. He refuses to leave here
humiliated. He blinks. His eyes sting. He knows they’re reddening and knowing this makes him angry. How dare the kid do this to him. How
dare
he. He pushes his head against the barrel
of the gun, making it hurt, wanting it to hurt, wanting to feel more anger and less humiliation.

‘You gonna pull the trigger or put the gun away?’ he says. ‘Your choice.’

‘Take the gun off him, Francis. Mr Stuart’s leaving.’

The kid hesitates but finally does as he was told.

‘That’s right, boy,’ Teddy says. ‘Do what the boss man says.’

The kid twitches at being called boy and mumbles something about not being no spade. This is good. He’s at least gotten under the kid’s skin. It doesn’t release the
spring-pressure in his belly, the tension that wants to explode from within him, but it’s good nonetheless. It’s something.

He stands up and straightens his tie. He glances around the large room. Most everyone is looking at him, silent. He recognizes several of them, their white faces like signs showing him their
amused shock. He feels tears wanting once more to well in his eyes, but refuses them, blinks them away.

‘I’m sure it was a misunderstanding, Mr Stuart,’ Herb Boykin says. ‘I do think it’s best if you leave for the night, but you’re welcome back. You’ll
have fifty dollars in chips waiting for you at the counter.’

‘I’m not coming back here, you stupid son of a bitch. What happened here wasn’t a misunderstanding. Your dealer’s a mechanic. A
cheat
. That’s a reflection on
you. You and your place. So fuck you.
Fuck
you.’

He hawks up a mouthful and spits it into Boykin’s face. It runs down the man’s cheek like frothed egg white.

Boykin removes a handkerchief and wipes it away. Then he looks past Teddy and nods. Teddy turns around in time to see a large Negro take two steps toward him while swinging a hefty enameled sap.
A moment later everything goes bright, like looking into the sun. Then black.

There is no transition, just click, like a light being turned off.

1

Headlights flash briefly against Sandy’s bedroom window as a vehicle turns onto the street. It rolls up the hill from the corner and pulls to a stop outside. The brakes
squeal. The engine dies, turning over a last couple times slowly, winding down like a clockwork toy, then going silent. A car door squeaks open, slams shut. Footsteps approach the front door and
the front door, after a jangling of keys, swings open. A moment later it closes. Then the sound of a dead-bolt sliding into place. Keys being set down on the scratched surface of the table by the
front door. Shoes being kicked off and dropping to the floor one after the other with a thud and a thud. Footsteps padding away. Water running in the kitchen. The pipes moaning. A glass being
filled. Silence. A glass being set down on the counter. Creaking floorboards. The couch straining.

Then five minutes of silence. It rings loudly in Sandy’s ears, like tinnitus.

Finally the snoring begins. His stepfather’s asleep. Soon he’ll be asleep forever.

Sandy pushes off the bed.

The carpet feels strange beneath his feet, coarse and unnatural and unpleasant. He sets down the gun to put clothes on. His stepfather’s asleep; he’s not going to look in on him and
wonder what the hell he’s doing dressed in the middle of the night. You up to no good again? What you been up to? You answer me, you little shit, don’t just shrug with that blank-stupid
look on your face. What you been up to? Why you dressed? His stepfather’s asleep and Sandy wants to be clothed for what he’s about to do.

Being unclothed makes him feel vulnerable.

After putting on a pair of pants and a T-shirt Sandy collects the bullets from a shoebox under his bed and puts one into his pocket. The other he puts into the back of his homemade gun. He walks
to his bedroom door. He stands there for a long time – heart pounding, hands sweaty. He licks his lips.

His mind is chaos, thoughts coming at him from every direction. Don’t do it, you have to do it. What if mom comes home? What if he wakes up? What if mom comes home? Don’t do it. If
he wakes up and sees you with the gun he’ll take it from you and kill you with it. You have to do it, don’t do it, just get undressed and get back into bed and go to sleep. Just get
into bed and sleep. It’s safer. What if he wakes up? Sometimes you have good dreams. If you go to sleep now maybe you’ll have good dreams. Don’t do it, don’t do it, you have
to do it, you’ve got to, you must, don’t—

He steps into the hallway. He walks down its narrow length. The walls feel like they’re pushing toward him. Then he’s through the hallway and into the living room with the gun
gripped in his fist. Gripped tight.

He’s afraid.

But as he walks, a strange thing happens:

Picture a single-storey house with blue-painted wood siding covering the exterior walls and gray asphalt shingles lining the roof. Picture it standing in the dark of night, the windows bright
yellow rectangles revealing every room to anyone who might wander by. A record player blares scratchy in the dining room, sounding as if the record’s spinning the wrong way. On a radio in the
front bedroom someone talks excitedly but incoherently, the consonants and vowels somehow failing to form words. In the kitchen a dog wails like an infant while in the hallway a baby barks
madly.

This is Sandy’s mind when he begins walking.

But with each step one room in the house of his mind goes dark. With each step one room goes silent. Each step is like a switch shutting off part of his brain until when he arrives before his
stepfather his mind’s quiet and dark and calm as the space between two heartbeats. Everything outside this moment is a dream. Everything outside this moment has ceased to exist.

There’s only one window still lighted and Sandy, standing on the sidewalk, can see himself through it, lifting a makeshift pistol and aiming it at his sleeping stepfather’s left
temple.

His stepfather: sprawled out on the couch, the old sagging couch with its itchy upholstery, one arm flopped over his fat belly, the other hanging down, knuckles on the carpet, palm open like
he’s expecting silver. Shallow nasal snores as he inhales through his nostrils are followed by quiet exhalations through his open mouth like wind through a canyon but distant.

Except for these sounds, silence.

All other noises have been erased. In their place, a strange calm.

But something’s coming. Like a train you sense even before you can hear it, the vibrations on your skin, something approaches.

It’s happening. He doesn’t even feel like he’s doing it. It feels as though he’s a mere puppet and someone else is controlling him. Someone else is pulling the strings,
but it’s happening, and soon it’ll be finished.

Sandy watches himself raise the gun. Watches himself pull back on the washer. Watches the rubber band stretch. Watches the color change slightly, turning a lighter shade of beige as the rubber
thins and grows taut.

He watches himself let it go.

There’s nothing to it. The fingers separate by mere millimeters and the metal washer jumps from between them.

The gun makes a muted popping sound. The empty shell shoots out the back of the gun and thwacks Sandy in the neck. His stepfather’s head snaps to the right. Then he sits up, his stepfather
sits up, wobbling drunkenly, reminding Sandy of a buoy on the water, bobbing . . . bobbing . . . bobbing.

With the sound of the shot Sandy seems to have been slammed back into himself, and now here he is again – hi, old friend, it’s been too long – standing only feet from his
stepfather, and his first thought is that it didn’t work. The gun didn’t work correctly. If it had worked correctly his stepfather would be dead. But he’s not dead. He’s
sitting on the couch, he’s lifting his head, he’s looking at Sandy. He’s saying, ‘What – what happened?’

Blood trickles down the side of his face.

Sandy opens his mouth to respond, but there are no words.

2

He looks at his stepfather. His stepfather looks back. The gun hangs from Sandy’s small fist. Blood trickles down the side of his stepfather’s face. His left eye
fills with blood. The hole in his temple is black. You could easily plug it with a pencil eraser. There you go, sir, all fixed up, see the girl at the front desk about the bill. His stepfather
blinks. A tear of blood rolls down his cheek from his left eye.

He repeats his earlier question: ‘What . . . happened?’

Sandy can only stare.

‘Oh, God,’ his stepfather says.

He leans forward, resting his arms on his knees, looking down at the carpet between his feet. His hair hangs in sweaty clumps. There’s a bald spot at the crown of his head, a semi-circle
of shiny skin about as big around as a silver dollar, and a red pimple just inside the hairline. Blood drips from the side of his face and onto his calf. Blood drips onto the carpet. He
doesn’t seem to notice.

‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘I must’ve drunk more . . . more than I . . . more than I . . .’

He spits between his feet. A long string of saliva stretches almost a full foot before snapping and falling to the floor.

‘I think I might be sick,’ he says.

Sandy puts a second bullet into the gun, forcing himself to stay where he is and do this. His heart pounds in his chest and he wishes already, with it still unfinished, that he had listened to
his doubts. He never should have done this.

He wants to turn and run. He could run away and never come back. If he did that he wouldn’t have to finish this. He could just go away and live the life of a hobo and he would never have
to see Neil again. He wouldn’t have to finish this and he wouldn’t have to see Neil either. That’s what he should have done in the first place. Some older hobo would teach him
about hobo life. Maybe that’s where his real father is, riding the rail, looking for day-labor jobs, cooking beans over an open fire in a hobo camp somewhere. He might run into his real
father. They would instantly recognize each other, and his father would say he was sorry for leaving, and he would teach him about hobo life, and he would tell him stories of his adventures. He
could do that instead of this. He could do that and everything would be okay. Everything would be fine. Everything would be great.

He aims the gun with a shaky hand at the bald spot at the top of Neil’s head. He closes his eyes. Neil’s going to look up now and stop him.

Right now. Right now.

Sandy opens his eyes. The man still sits, sagging, looking down at a dark circle of spit on the carpet. Drool hangs from his face. He has a strange rotten-sweet smell to him, like a fruit bowl
left on the table too long in the heat of summer. He always smells that way after he’s been drinking. Sandy’s come to associate that sweet smell of fermentation with violence, with
getting hit.

Tears stream down his face.

‘You shouldn’t have been so mean,’ he says.

His stepfather starts to look up at him now, too late, saying in a slurred voice, ‘Wha—’

But that’s all he ever manages.

1

Teddy wakes up face-down in a parking lot. He rolls over, sits up, touches his face. There are bits of gravel imbedded there. He brushes them from his cheek and they fall to
the ground.

At first he’s possessed by confusion and a strange uncomprehending sadness, as if he’d awakened from a nightmare he could not quite remember – just vague unpleasant images and
a sound like a gate swinging on a rusty hinge – but that soon gives way to anger as he remembers what happened, how he was humiliated.