Alexander Ferrar's Blog
January 12, 2014
In Shining Armor ~ Chapter 1
I
“I've been very near death. And you can't imagine the wild elation of those moments—it's the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it
—when one meets death face to face.”
—Andre Malraux
The Royal Way (1935)
The second most horrible moment of Chandler Tuttle's life was the first time he played Russian Roulette at age seventeen. The second time wasn't as bad, a week later, but it was still more than a little unnerving. The thunder of his pulse pounding in his ears and the voice inside his head screaming "Do it! Do it, you little wimp!" culminating in a small heart attack at the sound of the dry, empty click of the hammer falling. He had collapsed, gasping as all of his "friends" laughed, ribbing each other with their elbows and pointing at him, then ruffling his hair as if he'd just lost his virginity and they were proud of him. As his breathing returned to normal, he became aware of how much brighter all of the colors in the room seemed. How exquisitely formed were all of the objects it contained, from the perfectly-shaped bottles of booze on the shelves and the crystalline purity of the glasses. The sparkle of the beautiful light reflecting on the baroque ice cubes that
settled and cracked in lowballs of sipping scotch. The tragic glamour of the Toulouse Lautrec-style burlesque poster on the wall. The kindly camaraderie of his friends sharing his moment of resurrection. That second most horrible moment of his life had become the second most wonderful, and the two had become married in his mind from that moment on.
As the years wore on, he came to need that resurrection at certain points in his life. Sometimes it was after an opera, but always on the last night, of course. He would never think of leaving the show without its star if the hammer should fall on a live round. That would be more than just inconsiderate. As his friend Richard would say, that would be “just the height of poor taste.” No, he would wait until the last night, after all the fanfare and had died down and the champagne was gone and all the others had either paired off or passed out, and the great feeling of emptiness crept into his stomach.
Then he would slip away into the night and find a quiet place. He was also considerate of whichever poor sap would fall the burden of cleaning up after him. He never did it in his hotel room, where the scandal of it might ruin the fine estab-lishment’s reputation, and wallpaper. If he did it on a rooftop somewhere, he made sure to check the wind’s direction. God forbid his brain (if indeed he had one) was blown away into the night to spatter someone’s laundry drying on the line, or spot some couple’s cheeks and ruin their first kiss.
That one night after singing the lead in the opera version of Dorian Gray, and getting that same ol’ standing ovation as always, he had found a short wall to sit upon at the side of a river, spinning the cylinder blindly and putting the barrel of his snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 to the leeward side of his head, over his ear like his friends had been sure to advise him, instead of at his temple, and then asked himself the same question he always asked.
“Are you ready?”
And he’d waited a moment, truly living in that moment and enjoying the crisp wind, if there was one, the twittering of the night-birds, if there were any, and listening carefully for anything that might stop him from doing it. A beautiful young woman running up to stop him and say No! Don’t do it! Toss that awful gun into the river and come have a coffee with me, and tell me your story and make me melt and fall in love with you, and we’ll live happily ever after. Or words to that effect.
There was a distant chorus of car horns, and some people chattering excitedly somewhere. He adjusted his seating on the wall so that, if he should die that next instant, he would fall into the river and the people talking would not come running to find his body lying there in the darkness and scream, and have whatever happiness ruined. Got to be mindful of others, he reminded himself. It’s very selfish to die making a spectacle of yourself.
He held his breath, closed his eyes, felt the rhythm of the world around him, felt at peace with it, let out his breath slowly and opened his eyes. And pulled the trigger.
Click!
And that time he didn’t gasp in relief.
Somehow, on this, the seventh time, not blowing his own brains out was really no big deal. It was kind of, he hated to think it, a bit of a disappointment.
The eighth time was a pretty casual thing, too. Kind of a non-event. Ditto the next three, until he was really quite bored with it. He began to think he might be immortal, which would really suck, considering the circumstances.
The twelfth time, however, was a different story.
He had sung a one-night show at the hotel Casa Santo Domingo in Antigua Guatemala, back there in the lovely ruins of what had once been a monastery. They’d done the Requiem and, as usual, brought down the house. Champagne and kissy-kissy on the cheeks followed, everyone coming up to put their cheek near his and make sucking sounds with their lips pursed and then go off to squeal with delight at some other celebrity.
He slipped away early, that time, and wandered the quaint cobblestone streets, listening to the night-birds and the wind rustling the bougainvillea that tumbled down over the walls of one-storey buildings. The town was already asleep.
He didn’t know where he ended up, just that he found a small ruin on a side street, an old tumbledown structure with lots of trees and bushes, and he decided it was good enough.
He climbed up with some difficulty because the dirt was slippery and he didn’t want to ruin his tux, just in case he survived again. He grabbed a hold of branches and plants to steady himself, and fought his way to the top of a narrow slope that ran along the side of the ruin, and looked for a place to be comfortable.
This time, though, when he sat, checked the pistol’s cylinder to look at the one bullet in there, and spun it, and took notice of the world and its sounds and smells, he heard someone. Being nosy, he looked for the source of the voices, and saw a small group of men moving stealthily along the narrow street. They did not seem to be on a happy errand, so he shrunk himself, turtle-like, into his mental shell and made himself as invisible as he could. It is one thing to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. It is quite another to be shot at by someone else. The men passed beneath him and continued on, and he, deciding not to mind his own business, followed them.
As quietly as he could, he moved up the slope to the edge of a building and hauled himself up onto the roof a few feet above his head. He scrambled quietly with his feet on the wall and made dirty skidmarks with his loafers before getting his elbows hooked onto the shingles. Then, breath held, he tight-rope-walked across the apex as quietly as he could, all the while thinking that this was a really, really stupid thing to do, but it was better than dying or going back to his hotel room alone. Especially when room service had ended hours ago.
He slipped from one roof to another, which wasn’t diffi-cult since all of the buildings of every block were built right up against one another. Luckily, the badguys were headed for the only two-storey house on the street, and it was the next one. It had a lighted window on the second floor, and he crept up to it with as much stealth as his loafers allowed.
He couldn’t see how the badguys were getting into the front door, but they were, and not with the attitude of wel-come visitors. In the room of the lighted window was a white man who looked a lot like Chandler, in that he was dressed well with clean-cut good looks and a boyish face. He was pulling strips from a roll of duct tape and sticking them by their ends to the cellophane wrapped around what looked like…oh dear, were those pound bags of weed?
Chandler gaped for a moment, and then started to laugh silently to himself, thinking Of all the windows to creep up on!
The young man’s head snapped toward the door, and he whipped his supple body into a crouch, his hand darting in-stinctively for a gun on his hip that wasn’t there. His eyes darted all around the room looking for where he must have placed it while his mind was on other things, but it was too late. The men entered the room with someone else, a young Guatemalan woman in guipil and corte, the traditional woven top and long skirt that the Indigenous wear. She was held between the two biggest of the six men, all of them dark and menacing. Three of the other four held pistols in their hands, and the fourth came into the room with an evil smirk on his cruel thin mouth. They all looked at the young man with rapist eyes, and the unarmed one spoke in Spanish, moving toward the bundles of marijuana and laying a hand on the corner one, stroking it lightly.
Chandler understood a Spanish (and French and German and Italian) but couldn’t make out what the leader was saying because the window was closed. He was suddenly thankful that the light was on inside with no streetlights to betray his face on the other side of the glass. The window was a mirror to everyone inside.
I should go, he thought. I really, really should.
Poor guy inside, though, and poor housekeeper or whoev-er the woman was. But that’s why you don’t get into the drug trade, he thought.
He watched the leader advancing slowly on the white man while he spoke, his bearing unmistakably threatening, until he stopped with their noses maybe two inches away. He said something else, turning his head and pursing his lips, jerking his chin at the housekeeper, and looked back into the young man’s eyes, smiling wickedly.
And the young man’s head tilted back slightly and snapped forward, unexpectedly shattering the dark man’s nose and bloodying his face. Chandler and the other men in the room jumped, shocked, unbelieving as the young man ducked and jabbed his fist into the man’s solar plexus, rose and grabbed a handful of his hair, stepping backwards to make room and jerk him around as a human shield. One hand slipped under the Guatemalan’s armpit and came back around to grab his Adam’s apple, his fingertips digging into the bristly throat.
“Run that by me again?” he snapped in English.
The badguys shouted and pointed their weapons at his head, but he said “I wouldn’t!” like “I wouldn’t if I were you,” just shortening it, and when they made to hit their hostage he dug his fingers in deeper and made that sharp “At!” noise that one shouts at a dog when it’s about to do something wrong.
The leader was trying to struggle, but the young man’s fingers just dug in deeper and deeper, making the man’s dark face go hot and red.
Chandler couldn’t believe it. What guts this kid had! In one moment he turned the tables and went from being anoth-er statistic to being…well, probably another statistic anyway, but one who would at least take the leader with him, and Chandler liked that. He liked it enough to step in. He inched his way back from the window and putted the snub-nosed .38 out of his tux jacket’s side pocket, thinking Glass doesn’t shatter outwards, does it? Not when it’s shot from outside, right?
He leveled the pistol at the foremost gunman, aimed square at his chest, then reconsidered and aimed at the face just in case the guy was wearing a bullet-proof vest, and was planning on squeezing the trigger until it went off when BANG, the window exploded and the gunman fell backwards into his colleagues with a bloody ruin of a face.
Jesus, Chandler thought. That one was for me. If this hadn’t happened, my number would’ve been up.
The young man was staring over his shoulder at him, his eyes wide, and Chandler felt he should say something. Some-thing clever, but couldn’t think of anything. He just pointed his now-empty (but nobody else knew that) pistol at the henchmen and said reassuringly “This is what they call Deus Ex Machina.”
The white man gasped out a startled laugh and turned back to face the badguys who were spitting and wiping blood and brain matter and shards of bone out of their eyes, looking like they were completely at a loss.
“Drop em!” the young man shouted, then remembered himself and said “Armas al suelo y manos arriba!”
They hesitated, looking at their leader, and he gurgled. They tried to back out of the room and Chandler jabbed the gun at them and screamed, repeating what the white man said. The goons let the housekeeper go, and she swatted their guns out of their hands in sudden fury and kicked one of them over her master, who summarily tore out his hostage’s throat and shoved him forward to stagger and fall while he snatched up the gun at his feet.
He fired rapidly, blowing the others backwards through the door, the housekeeper jumping and crying out in fear.
Chandler’s fist shook, the gun smoking in his hand.
The young man looked at him over his shoulder again and said “You’re not going to shoot me with that thing, are you Mr. Deus Ex Machina?”
Chandler coughed and said “Um, it’s empty now.”
The guy laughed. “You’re kidding!”
“Nope. I only had one. Long story.”
“Oh my God, I can’t breathe. Where the hell did you come from?” He held out a hand to help Chandler climb down through the window, and the opera singer kicked out jagged shards of glass before accepting.
“I’ll explain later. I suppose we ought to leave.”
“Well, yeah, I imagine we do. What’s your name?”
“Tuttle. Chandler Tuttle.”
“Like Bond, James Bond.”
“Ha! Yeah, I guess. And you?”
“People call me Rabbit,” the young man said.
The housekeeper kept saying “No tenga pena,” but they didn’t understand why, so they shoved all of the bundles of weed through the shattered window onto the roof outside, clambered out, and started throwing them into the overgrown bushes of the ruins behind the house as quickly as they could.
“Mi cuñado tiene flete,” she said about the bodies, and Chandler and Rabbit just looked at her blankly, and did facial shrugs like What the fuck does that mean?
“Mira, no tenga pena. Mi cuñado tiene flete,” she repeated.
Rabbit said Whatever, and they left the house as quietly as they could, surprised that no one had so much as turned on a light or pressed their nose to a window to see who had fired the shots. They darted across the street to hide in shadows, and slunk down the street to a perpendicular branch that led to Primera Avenida Sur. Looking carefully around the corner, they saw people smoking cigarettes down the way, and they composed themselves, put on a casual air, and came strutting around the corner. The people looked like backpackers and vagabonds, and they cast desultory glances at them as they approached, with this affected attitude of being just too good to be bothered with anything else, despite their flip-flops and jean cutoffs.
One of them, a stoned kid with curly hair and a tank top asked them “Heyyy maaaannn, you heard those gunshots?”
Chandler and Rabbit looked at each other, each thinking I dunno, should we feign ignorance? And telepathically agreeing that they couldn’t pull it off convincingly at that moment, you know, considering the circumstances. Having, you know, just shot some people. So Rabbit said “Is that what that was?”
“I dunno, man. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well,” and he and the others laughed. “It did kinda sound like it, or whatever. But whatever.”
And the others laughed some more and one skinny blonde girl with super short shorts that didn’t make any difference repeated what he said as if it were the funniest thing ever.
Chandler and Rabbit looked at each other again, each try-ing not to roll his eyes or laugh, and said in unison “No tenga pena!” They grinned and Rabbit added “Jinx! Buy me a soda!”
“What’s that mean?” a wiry young guy with stubble on his shaven head asked. His lips seemed way too red for his pallid face, and he looked like he wanted to start a fight, for any reason at all.
They ignored him and asked what place this was, with the open door where they were standing. Red light and music were tumbling out of that narrow door, and they wanted to be inside this obvious bar but needed these ass-hats to step aside.
“No se,” the blonde girl said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.
It didn’t sound like she was saying that like she didn’t know, though, she said it with an inflection like that was the answer, and they looked at the wall to see a sign that read Café No Se.
Oh.
“Any good in there?”
She shrugged.
The future of America, Chandler thought.
“Well, it was nice talking to you,” he said in a dismissive way, and stepped forward. She raised her eyebrows like Whateverrrr and backed up to let them pass, and when they stepped up and through the door, Rabbit heard them all say “Faggots” in unison, and then giggle and shout “Jinx! Buy me a soda!”
He ground his teeth, but said nothing. He then had time to think about how his new friend did indeed seem gay, and that would make him seem gay to everyone who would see them together, and he began to resent this man who had just saved his life. Not for being gay, but for potentially calling attention to him in a negative way while he was trying to keep a low profile. He immediately reprimanded himself for doing it, but it didn’t matter. It was still there.
They entered Café So Se and were glad to be there. There was an antechamber with a small bar and a door that led to a fairly narrow dive, with low light and lots of smoke, and it was full of expatriates and tourists who turned and looked them up and down. It felt a little clichéd, like a Western movie.
“Hola!” a fifty-something white bartender with salt-and-pepper hair said, interrupting his conversation with another, curly-haired fellow. The other glanced over, sized them up and smiled and stood up straighter.
“Welcome!” he said. “Where you from?”
Chandler and Rabbit glanced at each other and hesitated, then Chandler said “Well, I’m British, and I just met him…”
“Here and there,” Rabbit said.
“Yeah, we get a lot of that. A lot of here-and-theres end up in Antigua. England, huh? Nice tux. You coming from a wedding?”
This guy must be the owner, Chandler thought. They went to the bar and shook hands with Curly and the bartender.
“No, I was singing at Santo Domingo.”
Eyebrows went up, and Rabbit frowned.
“Really?” The owner and the bartender did that nodding smile with the down-curving lips and wide eyes. “Wow, I was reading about that in Que Pasa. I’m John,” the owner said.
“Chandler.”
“And I’m Mike,” the bartender said. “Never met anyone named Chandler. Just seen the guy on Friends.”
“I get that a lot. You know how a lot of surnames were an ancestor’s occupation? Smith, Carpenter, Shoemaker? Well, a chandler is the guy who makes candles.”
Again with the wide-eyed nodding and downward smile. They were being polite, and friendly, but they had something they would rather talk about. They looked at Rabbit and he said “My name’s Mike, too.”
“Ah! Tocayo!” the bartender said. “That’s what you call someone who has the same name as you.”
“Oh.”
Pause.
“So, hey! Those were gunshots a minute ago, huh?” the owner asked. “You were outside. Did you see anything?”
“Um, no. Sure didn’t. We thought it might’ve sounded like gunshots, but there were no police sirens after, so…”
“Ha! You won’t be hearing any sirens. Not here. Every-body minds their own business. It’s like New York, almost.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. No one’s going to call the cops, and if they did, no one would show up.”
“Sad but true,” a young, bearded guy said. “Last year, only seven percent of violent crimes that got reported in this country even resulted in a trial. Not even a conviction. A trial. And that’s only seven percent of the ones that got reported.”
“Wow,” Chandler said.
“How’d you know that?” Rabbit asked.
“It’s what I do,” the guy said. “I’m Luke.”
They all shook hands, and the owner said “Luke’s the di-rector of an NGO.”
“Really. A little young, aren’t you?”
Luke shrugged. “Only young, idealist nimrods will take a job like that. It’s hell on your nerves. You close yourself off all week long while you’re rescuing child prostitutes and freeing slaves and tracking down American chicks that went off into the bushes with the wrong studmuffin in Acapulco and now work in third-world whorehouses. Then you come out on the weekend and overcompensate with tequila.”
Chandler and Rabbit glanced at each other, eager to escape the conversation and sit down somewhere.
“Speaking of tequila…”
“Right! Where’s my manners?” John said. “You two look thirsty. If you like tequila, you might want to try our mezcal bar. Through that door and to the left. You’ll have to duck down a little to get in.”
“Thanks. Well, nice to meetcha,” Rabbit said.
They moved towards the door into the rest of the bar, but their passage was suddenly blocked by a well-dressed old man with white hair and tired eyes. Those eyes widened and his face lit up.
“You!”
Everyone in the bar’s antechamber looked at him, and then at Chandler again.
“It’s you! You were amazing!”
Chandler feigned modesty and a bashful smile.
“I’ve never heard a voice like that come out of a man. I’d read about your tenor but was completely unprepared to hear it with my own ears! Bruce! I’m Bruce. It’s a pleasure!”
“Thank you, Bruce. I’m glad you liked the performance. I’m beat though, and just want to have a quiet drink and relax, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all!” Bruce stepped aside to let Chandler and Rabbit pass, then went on to rave about the show to everyone in the room. His voice was loud in the long room they entered, and it made them feel a little self-conscious to have all of that attention. To their immediate left was a hole in the wall that was maybe four feet tall, with the words Mezcal Bar painted over it. It was lit by flickering candles and didn’t seem to be as full of people as the other two rooms, so they bent down and went in, but for a moment Chandler was brought up short by Bruce’s drunken voice rasping in the loudest stage-whisper, as if he wanted everyone to hear that he didn’t want everyone to hear him say “And he’s a castrato!”
Rabbit had to stop because Chandler’s tuxedoed back had halted, stiff, in front of him, and that made him wonder what castrato meant. Chandler’s shoulders sagged a little in front of him, and then he kept moving until both of them could stand up straight in another small room.
There was a young goateed Irishman behind the bar, and several girls that seemed like college kids off on an adventure, smoking and laughing at his jokes. It bugged the two men that they were all wearing flip-flops and crappy clothes.
Chandler and Rabbit went to one of the small tables and sat, signaling to the bartender and being ignored.
“So…” Rabbit said.
“Indeed.”
“I didn’t think I could hold it together much longer.”
“You were doing pretty well.”
“Thanks. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do now. I’ve got all that weed lying in the bushes behind the house and a bunch of dead men in the house.”
“Who were those guys?”
“Hell if I know. Local gangsters. My heart is still pounding so hard I can barely breathe.”
“Really? Wow. I thought you were acting like this was no big deal this whole time. Like you weren’t fazed at all.”
“Oh God, no. Jesus, I was about to get tortured to death. Thank you again, by the way. If you hadn’t come to my rescue, I’da been…and what were you doing out there, anyway?”
Chandler laughed. “Well, funny you should ask…it’s kind of dumb, actually.”
He made eye contact with the Irishman and was ignored once more. The bartender was purposely blowing them off.
“You a peeping tom? Sneaking around on rooftops, peer-ing into windows in the hopes of seeing some beautiful Latin chick come out of the shower?”
“Well, no. I was playing Russian Roulette.”
Pause.
“What?”
“Yeah. I do that. Sometimes.”
“Oh my God.”
“Well, yeah. It doesn’t seem like a big deal to me, I guess, but to anyone else, yeah, I suppose it’s pretty weird.”
“Understatement of the year.”
“Can we get a drink, please?” Chandler asked the Irishman politely, but slipping in a subtle tone of annoyance.
The bartender glanced at them, then did that look toward the girls where he doesn’t actually roll his eyes, but seems like he’s about to. Like Oy vey, see what I gotta put up with here? The girls laughed, and he put on a patronizing smile, leaned on his folded forearms and looked at Chandler.
“What can I get you?”
“Gin and tonic, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Well, you would have to go outside to get that, since we only serve mezcal in here.”
“Then what the fuck you ask us for?” Rabbit muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“We’ll have two of whatever you got, then.”
The bartender made a show of being the bigger man in front of the girls, letting these two assholes get off easy. “Well, we’ve got Joven, Reposado, and Añejo. And you can get a Blue Corn Margarita, or a Smokin’ Thyme, or a Paloma Blanca, or a—”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Surprise us,” Chandler said.
The Irishman this time did roll his eyes at his audience and they laughed again.
Chandler decided to let it slide, and in doing so, appeared even more definitely gay to Rabbit. Something about the way he sat and changed his posture slightly to blow it off.
Shit, he thought. That’s why we’re not getting any respect. God damn. These assholes think we’re queers. He didn’t mean to do it, to say what he said next, but it was a reflex.
“Hey, that one girl’s pretty cute, dontcha think?” he asked a little too loudly.
Chandler’s eyes flickered at him with annoyance, like he knew exactly what he was doing and resented it.
“Not to me. Looks too much like my ex-wife.”
Rabbit dropped his eyes, embarrassed.
“Yes, I know,” Chandler said quietly. “I don’t appear very masculine. It’s not because I am into men, so you can relax.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll get over it.”
“…So…Russian Roulette, huh?”
“Yeah…” and then Chandler warmed up a little, eager to smooth over that bump in the conversation and move on. “It is something some guys got me into when we were kids. You wouldn’t believe the feeling you get when that hammer clicks and you realize you’re still alive. You really appreciate every-thing around you after that, instead of just living in the past or the future, you know what I mean?”
“But, how often do people die from it?”
“That’s the funny thing. If I had not fired my one bullet at that goon in your house, I would have died tonight. If I had not heard them walking up the street and looking like they meant no good, and decided to follow them, that bullet would have put my lights out.”
Rabbit whistled.
“So that’s what happened, huh? They pretty much saved your life, and then you saved mine?”
“I suppose so. Do you think it was fate?”
“Whatever it was, I’m grateful.”
“Ehh, don’t mention it.”
“So, you were singing tonight? And you apparently did an amazing job. And you’re kind of famous. So why would you want to risk your life on a game like that?”
“Well, I’ve never said it out loud before. I don’t know how it will sound to somebody else, but it makes perfect sense, at least to me. Do you know anything about Buddhism?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, if you believe in reincarnation, like I do, there is a sort of ladder you climb. If you were good in your last life, you get to go up a rung, if you were bad, you take a step down. So the circumstances of your next life depend on your actions in this one. Parts of my life are good, but some parts really suck, so I am eager to start over with a new body. I have to time it just right, though, because if I die after doing a crappy thing, my next life might have me born into an abusive family, or a poverty-stricken one with no opportunities available later on, or maybe I’ll have a disability, or any number of things. And I also don’t want to die after doing too good of a thing, because I worry I might be a bodhisattva.”
“A what?”
“That’s somebody who is on his last rung before ascend-ing to Nirvana, someone who is just one step away from being reabsorbed by the universe, and he stays behind so that he can try and point other people in the right direction. Well, I don’t really want to do that, but sometimes I feel like that’s what I am. I feel it in my bones. But I have to be careful that I’m not too nice or too helpful to other people, so that I can make sure I come back at least one more time.”
“Why? Why not get reabsorbed and go to Heaven?”
“Well, let’s just say that I’m missing out on something, and I want to have it again.”
“You’re not going to tell me what it is, are you?”
“Here you go,” the bartender said.
They looked up at him, and at the two really girlie-looking margaritas with lime slices perched on the salted rims, and cherries and triangles of grapefruit impaled on toothpicks. They looked like, if he’d had some, they would’ve had big pink ostrich feathers coming out of them. He had this shit-eating smirk that the girls were giggling at, waiting to see how the two very obviously gay guys would react to this blatant insult.
“And that is?” Chandler asked.
“Paloma Blanca. Joven, lime juice, and grapefruit soda.”
“How’d you get a “White Pigeon” so pink?”
“I thought it appropriate.”
Just then, the blonde nitwit from outside stuck her head into the room from the short passageway, looked over at the both of them, and said “So, hey, which one of you doesn’t have any balls?”
That must have been her friends laughing outside, saying “Omigod, I can’t believe you said that!”
The ugly look on her face as she watched them, holding her smile while fighting back laughter, was one of such happy malice, like when a small child is horrible to another.
The bartender and the girls, and Rabbit, looked from the blonde to Chandler, saw his face turned to stone.
Rabbit’s heart broke for his new friend at that moment, when he realized, and he knew that they couldn’t walk out there and face all those people, so he stood and pulled out the pistol he had shot those men with earlier, not knowing what to do, but deciding to do something stupid, when the owner, John, grabbed the girl by the hair from behind and yanked her backwards out of sight. He was shouting something that they couldn’t hear, but it didn’t matter because the bartender and his entourage were staring at the gun in Rabbit’s hand.
Rabbit was trembling all over with unspent adrenaline, his eyes hard slices in his darkening face, and he glanced over at the bartender, whose face went white.
“You might want to rethink those drinks,” Rabbit said.
“Hey, I was just joking, these were for the girls—”
“Give me your pack of cigarettes, and your lighter, and a bottle of something.”
“Really, I was just kidding—”
“Come out from behind the bar to serve us. Chop chop.”
There was a tense moment when nobody moved.
Then John’s head appeared in the hole in the wall, eyes finding Rabbit and Chandler, and he said with utmost sincerity how sorry he was, and that that stupid girl was kicked out and barred for life, and—
And he noticed the gun in Rabbit’s fist.
And scarcely a second passed before he resumed. “So, let me buy you two a drink. Declan, why don’t you pour them a couple shots of the añejo? And me one too.” He crab-walked the rest of the way through the hole in the wall and into the small room, coming over to pull up a chair and sit at their table.
“You wouldn’t believe some of the people we get in here. They don’t know how to act. You know what I caught myself saying the other day? I swear to God, I was shaking my head and I said ‘These kids today, huh?’ Can you believe it? As soon as it was out of my mouth I felt so old and ridiculous, but that’s how it is, isn’t it? You get to be a certain age and you turn into your dad. And it has to be the most natural thing in the world, right? I suppose every generation thinks the one before them is a bunch of dumb old fogies who don’t know anything, and the one that comes after them is a bunch of idiots who think they know everything. Say, are you going to sit down or what? Pull up a chair and stay a while.”
And it worked. Rabbit felt dumb standing there with a gun in his hand, so he put it away and sat down, thinking Yeah, this guy’s definitely the owner because he’s the only one who knows what he’s doing. So he put the pistol away and sat down.
“We make our own mezcal, yunno,” John said. “Very proud of it. Have you tried it?”
“We had wanted to,” Chandler said. “But Declan over there didn’t want to serve us.”
“Are you serious?” John turned and looked at the bar, saw the Irishman busy toweling off some glasses with a surly stiff upper lip, with the two untouched margaritas in front of him, the girls themselves without any drinks in front of them.
“Declan,” he said.
The bartender did not make eye contact. He just dried off an already-dry glass.
“This is just what I’m talking about,” John said. “Idiot kids come to Antigua thinking they’re hot shit because they are from another country and they can get away with acting like children. So they come in here and ask for a job, but never actually do it. I see two drinks made that no one is drinking, no drinks in front of the people at the bar, and I still don’t see three shots of añejo in front of me. So, take a wild guess what that means, Deckie. It means Welcome to Dumpedville, population: you.”
Declan threw down the towel and mustered up some of that I-don’t-need-this-shit dignity and sucked his teeth in an I’m-better-than-all-of-you “tchk!”
They let him walk out, and the girls all looked at each other, agreeing, and got off their stools and followed him.
When the room was empty, John got up and said “C’mon, let’s go sit at the bar.” He took over as bartender and poured shots of the most expensive bottle, and Rabbit and Chandler accepted his offer.
He was doing something Rabbit understood as taking control of a bad situation. He had ignored the gun, kept on talking, distracted them from being angry by being mad about something else, and emptied the room of any potential hos-tages except himself. Rabbit had to respect him for that. And now they both had their backs to the one way in or out. Smart guy. But nobody felt threatened at all, so they relaxed.
“I’m reading David Niven’s autobiography right now, and—have you ever heard of David Niven?”
Chandler shook his head, but Rabbit said “Of course! Love him. Yunno he and Errol Flynn, of all people, used to experiment with drugs in, where was it? Alaska? Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Never woulda thought, those two. They seemed so strait-laced.”
“Oh God. Not Errol Flynn! You kidding me? You ever notice that he couldn’t act? He played the swashbuckling hero and the pirate and all, but he was kind of a ham? Well, guess where they found him? Hollywood, I mean. In Tazmania. He was the real deal. He was a pirate. They hired him to play the parts because he really was a sword-fighting daredevil. You ever see Charge of the Light Brigade? Well, while they were all getting ready to film the charge, he tried to mount his horse and got thrown. He hit the ground, got up, and asked ‘Who did it?’ He didn’t have to look under his horse’s saddle to see someone had stuffed a burr in there to make the horse jump when he sat down on it. He just said ‘Who did it?’ And the biggest sonofabitch said Me. And got off his horse so he could have the bragging rights of beating Errol Flynn’s arrogant ass in front of God and everybody. And Errol Flynn just whupped the shit out of him then and there, took the burr out from under his saddle, mounted up, and they went on filming the charge.”
Rabbit whistled. “That’s something.”
He was watching a dark and ugly man’s face appear in the mirror behind the bar, eyes wide and hard as he came through the hole in the wall.
“Todo bien, Juan Pablo?” the goon asked.
“Todo bien.” John replied. “Todo tranquilo.”
“Seguro?”
“Dejanos porfa. No necesitamos empezar la drama de nuevo.”
But the security thug didn’t want to go. He seemed to want trouble. Rabbit felt his neck feathers ruffle, but then Bruce bent down on the other side of the wall to shout past the security thug.
“Hey! Hey, why don’t you sing something? C’mon!”
Chandler sagged a little in his seat.
“Yeah, sing!” somebody shouted, and then the chant was taken up. “Sing, sing, sing, sing!”
John looked at Chandler with genuine sympathy, and when Rabbit saw the look on the opera singer’s face, he grabbed the Paloma Blanca nearest him and drained it in one go. The other two looked at him in surprise as he smacked his lips and wiped his smile theatrically with the back of his hand.
“Tart,” he said. “But not bad at all. Back in a minute.”
And he went to the hole in the wall where the security goon was still watching and made him get out of his way. When he disappeared through the hole into the main bar, there was thunderous applause, because only Bruce knew who the real opera singer was, and all of the others were drunk and wouldn’t listen to him protest.
John and Chandler both stared at the hole, listening to Rabbit’s voice with their mouths open.
“Thank you! Thank you, you’re too kind. You’re far too kind! Listen, I’ve been singing all night, so my voice is kind of hoarse and I definitely won’t be able to hit those high notes. Let me—excuse me, what? What’d you say? Okay listen, let’s get something straight. All of you, listen up. Any one of you who wants to call me a castrato can step outside and see what kind of balls I’ve got. My voice is a little higher because I beat testicular cancer at a young age and it messed with my development. And if anyone of you has a problem with that—”
A chorus of “No!”s cut him off, everyone feeling guilty for making a victim of the Big C feel bad about himself. John and Chandler shared a look of astonishment.
“That’s a really good friend you have,” the owner said.
“And we only just met.”
“Really? Oh yeah, you said earlier.”
“Yeah. Just now.”
“Well…my hat’s off to him.”
They looked at the hole again when Rabbit started singing, watching it even though they couldn’t see him.
Now, the owners of good bars know that there are some songs that people will deny ever even liking, but when they are played in a bar, everyone in the place will burst into song. Like anything by Bon Jovi. They unabashedly sing every word of it at the top of their lungs, and in doing so, admit to everyone else that yeah, they frickin like it, and so what? And since all of the other people are doing it, there’s a three-minute-long sense of camaraderie that elevates the spirits of all the bar’s patrons.
Out in the main bar, Rabbit had noticed that Luke had a guitar next to him on his bench by the wall, and beckoned him over, whispering in his ear. The young man had smiled, nodded, and put the guitar strap over his shoulder. Then, with a red-faced grin, started playing “Living on a Prayer.”
Most people frowned and blinked, remembering the tune but not being able to place it because no deep robotized voice was going “Wh-wh-wh-whoa whoa-whoa” for the first thirty seconds, but when it came around on the guitar and he belted out “Tommy used to work on the dah-ah-ahcks!” they cheered and whistled. It didn’t matter that Rabbit’s singing voice was okay at best. They couldn’t hear it because they all began singing along and pounding their fists on whatever flat surface was nearby.
“How did you two meet?” John asked.
“Eh…just bumped into each other and got to talking.”
The bar owner nodded and they listened to the crowd sing out with all their might, most of them being transported back to ten years before when this song was blaring out of every radio, and they were young and feeling like they were starting out in life instead of ending up.
“Well, I want to go watch,” John said. “You coming?”
“No, thanks. I’d rather everyone forget I’m in here.”
“Fair enough. Nice talking to you.”
Chandler nodded, and John left the room.
Funny kid, he thought, this Rabbit guy. Within one hour he was about to die a horrible death, killed several men, and is now singing his heart out in a bar to strangers. The alarm that he had been suppressing resurfaced in that moment. This kid’s a drug trafficker! And a murderer! Well, it was self-defense but the ease with which he did it and the swiftness with which he seemed to recover emotionally from taking lives must mean he had done it before! And surely, someone would be coming to avenge those deaths or…or the drug cartel to which that weed belonged would want blood for it being at risk in the bushes behind the house. And Chandler began to feel as if this tiny bar within a bar was closing in on him.
He swiveled on his bar stool and grabbed the other drink, took a sip, a gulp, and drained the rest of it, smacking his lips as Rabbit had.
Okay, he thought. I was leaving in a couple days, but now I should maybe go to the lake and lie low until it’s time for my flight out of here. Lake Atitlan was on his To Do list anyway. It is ringed with volcanoes and has a reputation for being one of the most spectacular sights ever, and is a good place to hide considering all the fugitives from the US that live there.
Or maybe that’s the first place the bad guys would look.
Maybe he should—
His worries were interrupted by thunderous applause, and in the midst of it, Rabbit reappeared from the hole in the wall. His face was flushed, and he was beaming.
“Thank you for doing that,” Chandler said.
“Least I could do,” Rabbit said, waving it off. “What I owe you isn’t even close to paid.”
The singer made a perfunctory attempt at a grunt and a smile, but decided to cut to the chase.
“Listen, what are you going to do now?”
Rabbit had gotten a cigarette from someone outside and was lighting it by sucking it to life off of a candle. He raised his eyebrows in a facial “What?”
“Well, you have some cartel after you, plus you may have just lost a large amount of pot, which I imagine has investors somewhere that will be a little pissed off with you, plus the police that may or may not—”
“No, not really. The police, maybe, but like they say around here, the police don’t really want to catch someone who killed a bunch of criminals. Street justice is very popular in this neck of the woods. And you can also bank on a bunch of illiterates being unwilling to do paperwork. I just won’t go back into that house again.”
“But what about all of your…goods?”
“What, that? That was oregano.”
Chandler blinked in surprise.
“Um…what?”
“Yeah. Well, it’s mostly oregano. Some of it’s parsley. I just got a bunch of herbs that look like marijuana and I wrapped it up in those bundles to attract attention.”
“Are you serious? Why?”
“Well, I figured that if I seemed like some kid moving large amounts of drugs, the wrong people would show up looking for me, people that would want to torture and/or kill me to get what they thought I had.”
“Why on Earth would you want that?”
Rabbit looked at Chandler as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.
“To kill them all, and make the world a better place.”
“I've been very near death. And you can't imagine the wild elation of those moments—it's the sudden glimpse of the absurdity of life that brings it
—when one meets death face to face.”
—Andre Malraux
The Royal Way (1935)
The second most horrible moment of Chandler Tuttle's life was the first time he played Russian Roulette at age seventeen. The second time wasn't as bad, a week later, but it was still more than a little unnerving. The thunder of his pulse pounding in his ears and the voice inside his head screaming "Do it! Do it, you little wimp!" culminating in a small heart attack at the sound of the dry, empty click of the hammer falling. He had collapsed, gasping as all of his "friends" laughed, ribbing each other with their elbows and pointing at him, then ruffling his hair as if he'd just lost his virginity and they were proud of him. As his breathing returned to normal, he became aware of how much brighter all of the colors in the room seemed. How exquisitely formed were all of the objects it contained, from the perfectly-shaped bottles of booze on the shelves and the crystalline purity of the glasses. The sparkle of the beautiful light reflecting on the baroque ice cubes that
settled and cracked in lowballs of sipping scotch. The tragic glamour of the Toulouse Lautrec-style burlesque poster on the wall. The kindly camaraderie of his friends sharing his moment of resurrection. That second most horrible moment of his life had become the second most wonderful, and the two had become married in his mind from that moment on.
As the years wore on, he came to need that resurrection at certain points in his life. Sometimes it was after an opera, but always on the last night, of course. He would never think of leaving the show without its star if the hammer should fall on a live round. That would be more than just inconsiderate. As his friend Richard would say, that would be “just the height of poor taste.” No, he would wait until the last night, after all the fanfare and had died down and the champagne was gone and all the others had either paired off or passed out, and the great feeling of emptiness crept into his stomach.
Then he would slip away into the night and find a quiet place. He was also considerate of whichever poor sap would fall the burden of cleaning up after him. He never did it in his hotel room, where the scandal of it might ruin the fine estab-lishment’s reputation, and wallpaper. If he did it on a rooftop somewhere, he made sure to check the wind’s direction. God forbid his brain (if indeed he had one) was blown away into the night to spatter someone’s laundry drying on the line, or spot some couple’s cheeks and ruin their first kiss.
That one night after singing the lead in the opera version of Dorian Gray, and getting that same ol’ standing ovation as always, he had found a short wall to sit upon at the side of a river, spinning the cylinder blindly and putting the barrel of his snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 to the leeward side of his head, over his ear like his friends had been sure to advise him, instead of at his temple, and then asked himself the same question he always asked.
“Are you ready?”
And he’d waited a moment, truly living in that moment and enjoying the crisp wind, if there was one, the twittering of the night-birds, if there were any, and listening carefully for anything that might stop him from doing it. A beautiful young woman running up to stop him and say No! Don’t do it! Toss that awful gun into the river and come have a coffee with me, and tell me your story and make me melt and fall in love with you, and we’ll live happily ever after. Or words to that effect.
There was a distant chorus of car horns, and some people chattering excitedly somewhere. He adjusted his seating on the wall so that, if he should die that next instant, he would fall into the river and the people talking would not come running to find his body lying there in the darkness and scream, and have whatever happiness ruined. Got to be mindful of others, he reminded himself. It’s very selfish to die making a spectacle of yourself.
He held his breath, closed his eyes, felt the rhythm of the world around him, felt at peace with it, let out his breath slowly and opened his eyes. And pulled the trigger.
Click!
And that time he didn’t gasp in relief.
Somehow, on this, the seventh time, not blowing his own brains out was really no big deal. It was kind of, he hated to think it, a bit of a disappointment.
The eighth time was a pretty casual thing, too. Kind of a non-event. Ditto the next three, until he was really quite bored with it. He began to think he might be immortal, which would really suck, considering the circumstances.
The twelfth time, however, was a different story.
He had sung a one-night show at the hotel Casa Santo Domingo in Antigua Guatemala, back there in the lovely ruins of what had once been a monastery. They’d done the Requiem and, as usual, brought down the house. Champagne and kissy-kissy on the cheeks followed, everyone coming up to put their cheek near his and make sucking sounds with their lips pursed and then go off to squeal with delight at some other celebrity.
He slipped away early, that time, and wandered the quaint cobblestone streets, listening to the night-birds and the wind rustling the bougainvillea that tumbled down over the walls of one-storey buildings. The town was already asleep.
He didn’t know where he ended up, just that he found a small ruin on a side street, an old tumbledown structure with lots of trees and bushes, and he decided it was good enough.
He climbed up with some difficulty because the dirt was slippery and he didn’t want to ruin his tux, just in case he survived again. He grabbed a hold of branches and plants to steady himself, and fought his way to the top of a narrow slope that ran along the side of the ruin, and looked for a place to be comfortable.
This time, though, when he sat, checked the pistol’s cylinder to look at the one bullet in there, and spun it, and took notice of the world and its sounds and smells, he heard someone. Being nosy, he looked for the source of the voices, and saw a small group of men moving stealthily along the narrow street. They did not seem to be on a happy errand, so he shrunk himself, turtle-like, into his mental shell and made himself as invisible as he could. It is one thing to put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. It is quite another to be shot at by someone else. The men passed beneath him and continued on, and he, deciding not to mind his own business, followed them.
As quietly as he could, he moved up the slope to the edge of a building and hauled himself up onto the roof a few feet above his head. He scrambled quietly with his feet on the wall and made dirty skidmarks with his loafers before getting his elbows hooked onto the shingles. Then, breath held, he tight-rope-walked across the apex as quietly as he could, all the while thinking that this was a really, really stupid thing to do, but it was better than dying or going back to his hotel room alone. Especially when room service had ended hours ago.
He slipped from one roof to another, which wasn’t diffi-cult since all of the buildings of every block were built right up against one another. Luckily, the badguys were headed for the only two-storey house on the street, and it was the next one. It had a lighted window on the second floor, and he crept up to it with as much stealth as his loafers allowed.
He couldn’t see how the badguys were getting into the front door, but they were, and not with the attitude of wel-come visitors. In the room of the lighted window was a white man who looked a lot like Chandler, in that he was dressed well with clean-cut good looks and a boyish face. He was pulling strips from a roll of duct tape and sticking them by their ends to the cellophane wrapped around what looked like…oh dear, were those pound bags of weed?
Chandler gaped for a moment, and then started to laugh silently to himself, thinking Of all the windows to creep up on!
The young man’s head snapped toward the door, and he whipped his supple body into a crouch, his hand darting in-stinctively for a gun on his hip that wasn’t there. His eyes darted all around the room looking for where he must have placed it while his mind was on other things, but it was too late. The men entered the room with someone else, a young Guatemalan woman in guipil and corte, the traditional woven top and long skirt that the Indigenous wear. She was held between the two biggest of the six men, all of them dark and menacing. Three of the other four held pistols in their hands, and the fourth came into the room with an evil smirk on his cruel thin mouth. They all looked at the young man with rapist eyes, and the unarmed one spoke in Spanish, moving toward the bundles of marijuana and laying a hand on the corner one, stroking it lightly.
Chandler understood a Spanish (and French and German and Italian) but couldn’t make out what the leader was saying because the window was closed. He was suddenly thankful that the light was on inside with no streetlights to betray his face on the other side of the glass. The window was a mirror to everyone inside.
I should go, he thought. I really, really should.
Poor guy inside, though, and poor housekeeper or whoev-er the woman was. But that’s why you don’t get into the drug trade, he thought.
He watched the leader advancing slowly on the white man while he spoke, his bearing unmistakably threatening, until he stopped with their noses maybe two inches away. He said something else, turning his head and pursing his lips, jerking his chin at the housekeeper, and looked back into the young man’s eyes, smiling wickedly.
And the young man’s head tilted back slightly and snapped forward, unexpectedly shattering the dark man’s nose and bloodying his face. Chandler and the other men in the room jumped, shocked, unbelieving as the young man ducked and jabbed his fist into the man’s solar plexus, rose and grabbed a handful of his hair, stepping backwards to make room and jerk him around as a human shield. One hand slipped under the Guatemalan’s armpit and came back around to grab his Adam’s apple, his fingertips digging into the bristly throat.
“Run that by me again?” he snapped in English.
The badguys shouted and pointed their weapons at his head, but he said “I wouldn’t!” like “I wouldn’t if I were you,” just shortening it, and when they made to hit their hostage he dug his fingers in deeper and made that sharp “At!” noise that one shouts at a dog when it’s about to do something wrong.
The leader was trying to struggle, but the young man’s fingers just dug in deeper and deeper, making the man’s dark face go hot and red.
Chandler couldn’t believe it. What guts this kid had! In one moment he turned the tables and went from being anoth-er statistic to being…well, probably another statistic anyway, but one who would at least take the leader with him, and Chandler liked that. He liked it enough to step in. He inched his way back from the window and putted the snub-nosed .38 out of his tux jacket’s side pocket, thinking Glass doesn’t shatter outwards, does it? Not when it’s shot from outside, right?
He leveled the pistol at the foremost gunman, aimed square at his chest, then reconsidered and aimed at the face just in case the guy was wearing a bullet-proof vest, and was planning on squeezing the trigger until it went off when BANG, the window exploded and the gunman fell backwards into his colleagues with a bloody ruin of a face.
Jesus, Chandler thought. That one was for me. If this hadn’t happened, my number would’ve been up.
The young man was staring over his shoulder at him, his eyes wide, and Chandler felt he should say something. Some-thing clever, but couldn’t think of anything. He just pointed his now-empty (but nobody else knew that) pistol at the henchmen and said reassuringly “This is what they call Deus Ex Machina.”
The white man gasped out a startled laugh and turned back to face the badguys who were spitting and wiping blood and brain matter and shards of bone out of their eyes, looking like they were completely at a loss.
“Drop em!” the young man shouted, then remembered himself and said “Armas al suelo y manos arriba!”
They hesitated, looking at their leader, and he gurgled. They tried to back out of the room and Chandler jabbed the gun at them and screamed, repeating what the white man said. The goons let the housekeeper go, and she swatted their guns out of their hands in sudden fury and kicked one of them over her master, who summarily tore out his hostage’s throat and shoved him forward to stagger and fall while he snatched up the gun at his feet.
He fired rapidly, blowing the others backwards through the door, the housekeeper jumping and crying out in fear.
Chandler’s fist shook, the gun smoking in his hand.
The young man looked at him over his shoulder again and said “You’re not going to shoot me with that thing, are you Mr. Deus Ex Machina?”
Chandler coughed and said “Um, it’s empty now.”
The guy laughed. “You’re kidding!”
“Nope. I only had one. Long story.”
“Oh my God, I can’t breathe. Where the hell did you come from?” He held out a hand to help Chandler climb down through the window, and the opera singer kicked out jagged shards of glass before accepting.
“I’ll explain later. I suppose we ought to leave.”
“Well, yeah, I imagine we do. What’s your name?”
“Tuttle. Chandler Tuttle.”
“Like Bond, James Bond.”
“Ha! Yeah, I guess. And you?”
“People call me Rabbit,” the young man said.
The housekeeper kept saying “No tenga pena,” but they didn’t understand why, so they shoved all of the bundles of weed through the shattered window onto the roof outside, clambered out, and started throwing them into the overgrown bushes of the ruins behind the house as quickly as they could.
“Mi cuñado tiene flete,” she said about the bodies, and Chandler and Rabbit just looked at her blankly, and did facial shrugs like What the fuck does that mean?
“Mira, no tenga pena. Mi cuñado tiene flete,” she repeated.
Rabbit said Whatever, and they left the house as quietly as they could, surprised that no one had so much as turned on a light or pressed their nose to a window to see who had fired the shots. They darted across the street to hide in shadows, and slunk down the street to a perpendicular branch that led to Primera Avenida Sur. Looking carefully around the corner, they saw people smoking cigarettes down the way, and they composed themselves, put on a casual air, and came strutting around the corner. The people looked like backpackers and vagabonds, and they cast desultory glances at them as they approached, with this affected attitude of being just too good to be bothered with anything else, despite their flip-flops and jean cutoffs.
One of them, a stoned kid with curly hair and a tank top asked them “Heyyy maaaannn, you heard those gunshots?”
Chandler and Rabbit looked at each other, each thinking I dunno, should we feign ignorance? And telepathically agreeing that they couldn’t pull it off convincingly at that moment, you know, considering the circumstances. Having, you know, just shot some people. So Rabbit said “Is that what that was?”
“I dunno, man. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Well,” and he and the others laughed. “It did kinda sound like it, or whatever. But whatever.”
And the others laughed some more and one skinny blonde girl with super short shorts that didn’t make any difference repeated what he said as if it were the funniest thing ever.
Chandler and Rabbit looked at each other again, each try-ing not to roll his eyes or laugh, and said in unison “No tenga pena!” They grinned and Rabbit added “Jinx! Buy me a soda!”
“What’s that mean?” a wiry young guy with stubble on his shaven head asked. His lips seemed way too red for his pallid face, and he looked like he wanted to start a fight, for any reason at all.
They ignored him and asked what place this was, with the open door where they were standing. Red light and music were tumbling out of that narrow door, and they wanted to be inside this obvious bar but needed these ass-hats to step aside.
“No se,” the blonde girl said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.
It didn’t sound like she was saying that like she didn’t know, though, she said it with an inflection like that was the answer, and they looked at the wall to see a sign that read Café No Se.
Oh.
“Any good in there?”
She shrugged.
The future of America, Chandler thought.
“Well, it was nice talking to you,” he said in a dismissive way, and stepped forward. She raised her eyebrows like Whateverrrr and backed up to let them pass, and when they stepped up and through the door, Rabbit heard them all say “Faggots” in unison, and then giggle and shout “Jinx! Buy me a soda!”
He ground his teeth, but said nothing. He then had time to think about how his new friend did indeed seem gay, and that would make him seem gay to everyone who would see them together, and he began to resent this man who had just saved his life. Not for being gay, but for potentially calling attention to him in a negative way while he was trying to keep a low profile. He immediately reprimanded himself for doing it, but it didn’t matter. It was still there.
They entered Café So Se and were glad to be there. There was an antechamber with a small bar and a door that led to a fairly narrow dive, with low light and lots of smoke, and it was full of expatriates and tourists who turned and looked them up and down. It felt a little clichéd, like a Western movie.
“Hola!” a fifty-something white bartender with salt-and-pepper hair said, interrupting his conversation with another, curly-haired fellow. The other glanced over, sized them up and smiled and stood up straighter.
“Welcome!” he said. “Where you from?”
Chandler and Rabbit glanced at each other and hesitated, then Chandler said “Well, I’m British, and I just met him…”
“Here and there,” Rabbit said.
“Yeah, we get a lot of that. A lot of here-and-theres end up in Antigua. England, huh? Nice tux. You coming from a wedding?”
This guy must be the owner, Chandler thought. They went to the bar and shook hands with Curly and the bartender.
“No, I was singing at Santo Domingo.”
Eyebrows went up, and Rabbit frowned.
“Really?” The owner and the bartender did that nodding smile with the down-curving lips and wide eyes. “Wow, I was reading about that in Que Pasa. I’m John,” the owner said.
“Chandler.”
“And I’m Mike,” the bartender said. “Never met anyone named Chandler. Just seen the guy on Friends.”
“I get that a lot. You know how a lot of surnames were an ancestor’s occupation? Smith, Carpenter, Shoemaker? Well, a chandler is the guy who makes candles.”
Again with the wide-eyed nodding and downward smile. They were being polite, and friendly, but they had something they would rather talk about. They looked at Rabbit and he said “My name’s Mike, too.”
“Ah! Tocayo!” the bartender said. “That’s what you call someone who has the same name as you.”
“Oh.”
Pause.
“So, hey! Those were gunshots a minute ago, huh?” the owner asked. “You were outside. Did you see anything?”
“Um, no. Sure didn’t. We thought it might’ve sounded like gunshots, but there were no police sirens after, so…”
“Ha! You won’t be hearing any sirens. Not here. Every-body minds their own business. It’s like New York, almost.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. No one’s going to call the cops, and if they did, no one would show up.”
“Sad but true,” a young, bearded guy said. “Last year, only seven percent of violent crimes that got reported in this country even resulted in a trial. Not even a conviction. A trial. And that’s only seven percent of the ones that got reported.”
“Wow,” Chandler said.
“How’d you know that?” Rabbit asked.
“It’s what I do,” the guy said. “I’m Luke.”
They all shook hands, and the owner said “Luke’s the di-rector of an NGO.”
“Really. A little young, aren’t you?”
Luke shrugged. “Only young, idealist nimrods will take a job like that. It’s hell on your nerves. You close yourself off all week long while you’re rescuing child prostitutes and freeing slaves and tracking down American chicks that went off into the bushes with the wrong studmuffin in Acapulco and now work in third-world whorehouses. Then you come out on the weekend and overcompensate with tequila.”
Chandler and Rabbit glanced at each other, eager to escape the conversation and sit down somewhere.
“Speaking of tequila…”
“Right! Where’s my manners?” John said. “You two look thirsty. If you like tequila, you might want to try our mezcal bar. Through that door and to the left. You’ll have to duck down a little to get in.”
“Thanks. Well, nice to meetcha,” Rabbit said.
They moved towards the door into the rest of the bar, but their passage was suddenly blocked by a well-dressed old man with white hair and tired eyes. Those eyes widened and his face lit up.
“You!”
Everyone in the bar’s antechamber looked at him, and then at Chandler again.
“It’s you! You were amazing!”
Chandler feigned modesty and a bashful smile.
“I’ve never heard a voice like that come out of a man. I’d read about your tenor but was completely unprepared to hear it with my own ears! Bruce! I’m Bruce. It’s a pleasure!”
“Thank you, Bruce. I’m glad you liked the performance. I’m beat though, and just want to have a quiet drink and relax, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all!” Bruce stepped aside to let Chandler and Rabbit pass, then went on to rave about the show to everyone in the room. His voice was loud in the long room they entered, and it made them feel a little self-conscious to have all of that attention. To their immediate left was a hole in the wall that was maybe four feet tall, with the words Mezcal Bar painted over it. It was lit by flickering candles and didn’t seem to be as full of people as the other two rooms, so they bent down and went in, but for a moment Chandler was brought up short by Bruce’s drunken voice rasping in the loudest stage-whisper, as if he wanted everyone to hear that he didn’t want everyone to hear him say “And he’s a castrato!”
Rabbit had to stop because Chandler’s tuxedoed back had halted, stiff, in front of him, and that made him wonder what castrato meant. Chandler’s shoulders sagged a little in front of him, and then he kept moving until both of them could stand up straight in another small room.
There was a young goateed Irishman behind the bar, and several girls that seemed like college kids off on an adventure, smoking and laughing at his jokes. It bugged the two men that they were all wearing flip-flops and crappy clothes.
Chandler and Rabbit went to one of the small tables and sat, signaling to the bartender and being ignored.
“So…” Rabbit said.
“Indeed.”
“I didn’t think I could hold it together much longer.”
“You were doing pretty well.”
“Thanks. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do now. I’ve got all that weed lying in the bushes behind the house and a bunch of dead men in the house.”
“Who were those guys?”
“Hell if I know. Local gangsters. My heart is still pounding so hard I can barely breathe.”
“Really? Wow. I thought you were acting like this was no big deal this whole time. Like you weren’t fazed at all.”
“Oh God, no. Jesus, I was about to get tortured to death. Thank you again, by the way. If you hadn’t come to my rescue, I’da been…and what were you doing out there, anyway?”
Chandler laughed. “Well, funny you should ask…it’s kind of dumb, actually.”
He made eye contact with the Irishman and was ignored once more. The bartender was purposely blowing them off.
“You a peeping tom? Sneaking around on rooftops, peer-ing into windows in the hopes of seeing some beautiful Latin chick come out of the shower?”
“Well, no. I was playing Russian Roulette.”
Pause.
“What?”
“Yeah. I do that. Sometimes.”
“Oh my God.”
“Well, yeah. It doesn’t seem like a big deal to me, I guess, but to anyone else, yeah, I suppose it’s pretty weird.”
“Understatement of the year.”
“Can we get a drink, please?” Chandler asked the Irishman politely, but slipping in a subtle tone of annoyance.
The bartender glanced at them, then did that look toward the girls where he doesn’t actually roll his eyes, but seems like he’s about to. Like Oy vey, see what I gotta put up with here? The girls laughed, and he put on a patronizing smile, leaned on his folded forearms and looked at Chandler.
“What can I get you?”
“Gin and tonic, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Well, you would have to go outside to get that, since we only serve mezcal in here.”
“Then what the fuck you ask us for?” Rabbit muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“We’ll have two of whatever you got, then.”
The bartender made a show of being the bigger man in front of the girls, letting these two assholes get off easy. “Well, we’ve got Joven, Reposado, and Añejo. And you can get a Blue Corn Margarita, or a Smokin’ Thyme, or a Paloma Blanca, or a—”
“For Christ’s sake.”
“Surprise us,” Chandler said.
The Irishman this time did roll his eyes at his audience and they laughed again.
Chandler decided to let it slide, and in doing so, appeared even more definitely gay to Rabbit. Something about the way he sat and changed his posture slightly to blow it off.
Shit, he thought. That’s why we’re not getting any respect. God damn. These assholes think we’re queers. He didn’t mean to do it, to say what he said next, but it was a reflex.
“Hey, that one girl’s pretty cute, dontcha think?” he asked a little too loudly.
Chandler’s eyes flickered at him with annoyance, like he knew exactly what he was doing and resented it.
“Not to me. Looks too much like my ex-wife.”
Rabbit dropped his eyes, embarrassed.
“Yes, I know,” Chandler said quietly. “I don’t appear very masculine. It’s not because I am into men, so you can relax.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Yes, you did.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll get over it.”
“…So…Russian Roulette, huh?”
“Yeah…” and then Chandler warmed up a little, eager to smooth over that bump in the conversation and move on. “It is something some guys got me into when we were kids. You wouldn’t believe the feeling you get when that hammer clicks and you realize you’re still alive. You really appreciate every-thing around you after that, instead of just living in the past or the future, you know what I mean?”
“But, how often do people die from it?”
“That’s the funny thing. If I had not fired my one bullet at that goon in your house, I would have died tonight. If I had not heard them walking up the street and looking like they meant no good, and decided to follow them, that bullet would have put my lights out.”
Rabbit whistled.
“So that’s what happened, huh? They pretty much saved your life, and then you saved mine?”
“I suppose so. Do you think it was fate?”
“Whatever it was, I’m grateful.”
“Ehh, don’t mention it.”
“So, you were singing tonight? And you apparently did an amazing job. And you’re kind of famous. So why would you want to risk your life on a game like that?”
“Well, I’ve never said it out loud before. I don’t know how it will sound to somebody else, but it makes perfect sense, at least to me. Do you know anything about Buddhism?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, if you believe in reincarnation, like I do, there is a sort of ladder you climb. If you were good in your last life, you get to go up a rung, if you were bad, you take a step down. So the circumstances of your next life depend on your actions in this one. Parts of my life are good, but some parts really suck, so I am eager to start over with a new body. I have to time it just right, though, because if I die after doing a crappy thing, my next life might have me born into an abusive family, or a poverty-stricken one with no opportunities available later on, or maybe I’ll have a disability, or any number of things. And I also don’t want to die after doing too good of a thing, because I worry I might be a bodhisattva.”
“A what?”
“That’s somebody who is on his last rung before ascend-ing to Nirvana, someone who is just one step away from being reabsorbed by the universe, and he stays behind so that he can try and point other people in the right direction. Well, I don’t really want to do that, but sometimes I feel like that’s what I am. I feel it in my bones. But I have to be careful that I’m not too nice or too helpful to other people, so that I can make sure I come back at least one more time.”
“Why? Why not get reabsorbed and go to Heaven?”
“Well, let’s just say that I’m missing out on something, and I want to have it again.”
“You’re not going to tell me what it is, are you?”
“Here you go,” the bartender said.
They looked up at him, and at the two really girlie-looking margaritas with lime slices perched on the salted rims, and cherries and triangles of grapefruit impaled on toothpicks. They looked like, if he’d had some, they would’ve had big pink ostrich feathers coming out of them. He had this shit-eating smirk that the girls were giggling at, waiting to see how the two very obviously gay guys would react to this blatant insult.
“And that is?” Chandler asked.
“Paloma Blanca. Joven, lime juice, and grapefruit soda.”
“How’d you get a “White Pigeon” so pink?”
“I thought it appropriate.”
Just then, the blonde nitwit from outside stuck her head into the room from the short passageway, looked over at the both of them, and said “So, hey, which one of you doesn’t have any balls?”
That must have been her friends laughing outside, saying “Omigod, I can’t believe you said that!”
The ugly look on her face as she watched them, holding her smile while fighting back laughter, was one of such happy malice, like when a small child is horrible to another.
The bartender and the girls, and Rabbit, looked from the blonde to Chandler, saw his face turned to stone.
Rabbit’s heart broke for his new friend at that moment, when he realized, and he knew that they couldn’t walk out there and face all those people, so he stood and pulled out the pistol he had shot those men with earlier, not knowing what to do, but deciding to do something stupid, when the owner, John, grabbed the girl by the hair from behind and yanked her backwards out of sight. He was shouting something that they couldn’t hear, but it didn’t matter because the bartender and his entourage were staring at the gun in Rabbit’s hand.
Rabbit was trembling all over with unspent adrenaline, his eyes hard slices in his darkening face, and he glanced over at the bartender, whose face went white.
“You might want to rethink those drinks,” Rabbit said.
“Hey, I was just joking, these were for the girls—”
“Give me your pack of cigarettes, and your lighter, and a bottle of something.”
“Really, I was just kidding—”
“Come out from behind the bar to serve us. Chop chop.”
There was a tense moment when nobody moved.
Then John’s head appeared in the hole in the wall, eyes finding Rabbit and Chandler, and he said with utmost sincerity how sorry he was, and that that stupid girl was kicked out and barred for life, and—
And he noticed the gun in Rabbit’s fist.
And scarcely a second passed before he resumed. “So, let me buy you two a drink. Declan, why don’t you pour them a couple shots of the añejo? And me one too.” He crab-walked the rest of the way through the hole in the wall and into the small room, coming over to pull up a chair and sit at their table.
“You wouldn’t believe some of the people we get in here. They don’t know how to act. You know what I caught myself saying the other day? I swear to God, I was shaking my head and I said ‘These kids today, huh?’ Can you believe it? As soon as it was out of my mouth I felt so old and ridiculous, but that’s how it is, isn’t it? You get to be a certain age and you turn into your dad. And it has to be the most natural thing in the world, right? I suppose every generation thinks the one before them is a bunch of dumb old fogies who don’t know anything, and the one that comes after them is a bunch of idiots who think they know everything. Say, are you going to sit down or what? Pull up a chair and stay a while.”
And it worked. Rabbit felt dumb standing there with a gun in his hand, so he put it away and sat down, thinking Yeah, this guy’s definitely the owner because he’s the only one who knows what he’s doing. So he put the pistol away and sat down.
“We make our own mezcal, yunno,” John said. “Very proud of it. Have you tried it?”
“We had wanted to,” Chandler said. “But Declan over there didn’t want to serve us.”
“Are you serious?” John turned and looked at the bar, saw the Irishman busy toweling off some glasses with a surly stiff upper lip, with the two untouched margaritas in front of him, the girls themselves without any drinks in front of them.
“Declan,” he said.
The bartender did not make eye contact. He just dried off an already-dry glass.
“This is just what I’m talking about,” John said. “Idiot kids come to Antigua thinking they’re hot shit because they are from another country and they can get away with acting like children. So they come in here and ask for a job, but never actually do it. I see two drinks made that no one is drinking, no drinks in front of the people at the bar, and I still don’t see three shots of añejo in front of me. So, take a wild guess what that means, Deckie. It means Welcome to Dumpedville, population: you.”
Declan threw down the towel and mustered up some of that I-don’t-need-this-shit dignity and sucked his teeth in an I’m-better-than-all-of-you “tchk!”
They let him walk out, and the girls all looked at each other, agreeing, and got off their stools and followed him.
When the room was empty, John got up and said “C’mon, let’s go sit at the bar.” He took over as bartender and poured shots of the most expensive bottle, and Rabbit and Chandler accepted his offer.
He was doing something Rabbit understood as taking control of a bad situation. He had ignored the gun, kept on talking, distracted them from being angry by being mad about something else, and emptied the room of any potential hos-tages except himself. Rabbit had to respect him for that. And now they both had their backs to the one way in or out. Smart guy. But nobody felt threatened at all, so they relaxed.
“I’m reading David Niven’s autobiography right now, and—have you ever heard of David Niven?”
Chandler shook his head, but Rabbit said “Of course! Love him. Yunno he and Errol Flynn, of all people, used to experiment with drugs in, where was it? Alaska? Back in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Never woulda thought, those two. They seemed so strait-laced.”
“Oh God. Not Errol Flynn! You kidding me? You ever notice that he couldn’t act? He played the swashbuckling hero and the pirate and all, but he was kind of a ham? Well, guess where they found him? Hollywood, I mean. In Tazmania. He was the real deal. He was a pirate. They hired him to play the parts because he really was a sword-fighting daredevil. You ever see Charge of the Light Brigade? Well, while they were all getting ready to film the charge, he tried to mount his horse and got thrown. He hit the ground, got up, and asked ‘Who did it?’ He didn’t have to look under his horse’s saddle to see someone had stuffed a burr in there to make the horse jump when he sat down on it. He just said ‘Who did it?’ And the biggest sonofabitch said Me. And got off his horse so he could have the bragging rights of beating Errol Flynn’s arrogant ass in front of God and everybody. And Errol Flynn just whupped the shit out of him then and there, took the burr out from under his saddle, mounted up, and they went on filming the charge.”
Rabbit whistled. “That’s something.”
He was watching a dark and ugly man’s face appear in the mirror behind the bar, eyes wide and hard as he came through the hole in the wall.
“Todo bien, Juan Pablo?” the goon asked.
“Todo bien.” John replied. “Todo tranquilo.”
“Seguro?”
“Dejanos porfa. No necesitamos empezar la drama de nuevo.”
But the security thug didn’t want to go. He seemed to want trouble. Rabbit felt his neck feathers ruffle, but then Bruce bent down on the other side of the wall to shout past the security thug.
“Hey! Hey, why don’t you sing something? C’mon!”
Chandler sagged a little in his seat.
“Yeah, sing!” somebody shouted, and then the chant was taken up. “Sing, sing, sing, sing!”
John looked at Chandler with genuine sympathy, and when Rabbit saw the look on the opera singer’s face, he grabbed the Paloma Blanca nearest him and drained it in one go. The other two looked at him in surprise as he smacked his lips and wiped his smile theatrically with the back of his hand.
“Tart,” he said. “But not bad at all. Back in a minute.”
And he went to the hole in the wall where the security goon was still watching and made him get out of his way. When he disappeared through the hole into the main bar, there was thunderous applause, because only Bruce knew who the real opera singer was, and all of the others were drunk and wouldn’t listen to him protest.
John and Chandler both stared at the hole, listening to Rabbit’s voice with their mouths open.
“Thank you! Thank you, you’re too kind. You’re far too kind! Listen, I’ve been singing all night, so my voice is kind of hoarse and I definitely won’t be able to hit those high notes. Let me—excuse me, what? What’d you say? Okay listen, let’s get something straight. All of you, listen up. Any one of you who wants to call me a castrato can step outside and see what kind of balls I’ve got. My voice is a little higher because I beat testicular cancer at a young age and it messed with my development. And if anyone of you has a problem with that—”
A chorus of “No!”s cut him off, everyone feeling guilty for making a victim of the Big C feel bad about himself. John and Chandler shared a look of astonishment.
“That’s a really good friend you have,” the owner said.
“And we only just met.”
“Really? Oh yeah, you said earlier.”
“Yeah. Just now.”
“Well…my hat’s off to him.”
They looked at the hole again when Rabbit started singing, watching it even though they couldn’t see him.
Now, the owners of good bars know that there are some songs that people will deny ever even liking, but when they are played in a bar, everyone in the place will burst into song. Like anything by Bon Jovi. They unabashedly sing every word of it at the top of their lungs, and in doing so, admit to everyone else that yeah, they frickin like it, and so what? And since all of the other people are doing it, there’s a three-minute-long sense of camaraderie that elevates the spirits of all the bar’s patrons.
Out in the main bar, Rabbit had noticed that Luke had a guitar next to him on his bench by the wall, and beckoned him over, whispering in his ear. The young man had smiled, nodded, and put the guitar strap over his shoulder. Then, with a red-faced grin, started playing “Living on a Prayer.”
Most people frowned and blinked, remembering the tune but not being able to place it because no deep robotized voice was going “Wh-wh-wh-whoa whoa-whoa” for the first thirty seconds, but when it came around on the guitar and he belted out “Tommy used to work on the dah-ah-ahcks!” they cheered and whistled. It didn’t matter that Rabbit’s singing voice was okay at best. They couldn’t hear it because they all began singing along and pounding their fists on whatever flat surface was nearby.
“How did you two meet?” John asked.
“Eh…just bumped into each other and got to talking.”
The bar owner nodded and they listened to the crowd sing out with all their might, most of them being transported back to ten years before when this song was blaring out of every radio, and they were young and feeling like they were starting out in life instead of ending up.
“Well, I want to go watch,” John said. “You coming?”
“No, thanks. I’d rather everyone forget I’m in here.”
“Fair enough. Nice talking to you.”
Chandler nodded, and John left the room.
Funny kid, he thought, this Rabbit guy. Within one hour he was about to die a horrible death, killed several men, and is now singing his heart out in a bar to strangers. The alarm that he had been suppressing resurfaced in that moment. This kid’s a drug trafficker! And a murderer! Well, it was self-defense but the ease with which he did it and the swiftness with which he seemed to recover emotionally from taking lives must mean he had done it before! And surely, someone would be coming to avenge those deaths or…or the drug cartel to which that weed belonged would want blood for it being at risk in the bushes behind the house. And Chandler began to feel as if this tiny bar within a bar was closing in on him.
He swiveled on his bar stool and grabbed the other drink, took a sip, a gulp, and drained the rest of it, smacking his lips as Rabbit had.
Okay, he thought. I was leaving in a couple days, but now I should maybe go to the lake and lie low until it’s time for my flight out of here. Lake Atitlan was on his To Do list anyway. It is ringed with volcanoes and has a reputation for being one of the most spectacular sights ever, and is a good place to hide considering all the fugitives from the US that live there.
Or maybe that’s the first place the bad guys would look.
Maybe he should—
His worries were interrupted by thunderous applause, and in the midst of it, Rabbit reappeared from the hole in the wall. His face was flushed, and he was beaming.
“Thank you for doing that,” Chandler said.
“Least I could do,” Rabbit said, waving it off. “What I owe you isn’t even close to paid.”
The singer made a perfunctory attempt at a grunt and a smile, but decided to cut to the chase.
“Listen, what are you going to do now?”
Rabbit had gotten a cigarette from someone outside and was lighting it by sucking it to life off of a candle. He raised his eyebrows in a facial “What?”
“Well, you have some cartel after you, plus you may have just lost a large amount of pot, which I imagine has investors somewhere that will be a little pissed off with you, plus the police that may or may not—”
“No, not really. The police, maybe, but like they say around here, the police don’t really want to catch someone who killed a bunch of criminals. Street justice is very popular in this neck of the woods. And you can also bank on a bunch of illiterates being unwilling to do paperwork. I just won’t go back into that house again.”
“But what about all of your…goods?”
“What, that? That was oregano.”
Chandler blinked in surprise.
“Um…what?”
“Yeah. Well, it’s mostly oregano. Some of it’s parsley. I just got a bunch of herbs that look like marijuana and I wrapped it up in those bundles to attract attention.”
“Are you serious? Why?”
“Well, I figured that if I seemed like some kid moving large amounts of drugs, the wrong people would show up looking for me, people that would want to torture and/or kill me to get what they thought I had.”
“Why on Earth would you want that?”
Rabbit looked at Chandler as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.
“To kill them all, and make the world a better place.”
September 4, 2013
They Neighbor's Wife
Prologue
Rabbit came bopping out of a store in a shopping center, packing his cigarettes against his palm, and Blue Tick looked down at him and asked “Are you ready?” The little man with the snazzy suit and the moviestar hair grinned. He was nervous and trying not to show it, and anybody else would’ve been fooled, but Tick had been his henchman for years, and knew better.
“When’d you start smoking again?”
“I’m not. I’m just going to have a few because she smokes, and I can’t stand the smell or the taste of a smoker if I’m not smoking too.”
“Good thinking,” the muscle-bound skinhead said, nodding, hoping his sarcasm wasn’t too subtle.
Rabbit lit the first cigarette and took a long drag to get into character. His expression grew thoughtful.
“Yunno what I heard someone say a minute ago? It was a bit disturbing. ‘The children of single mothers grow up knowing what’ll get them laid.’ I had to think about that for a bit. But yeah, if Mom’s coming home with some new guy all the time, the girls see how she acts and, when they come of age, follow her example, and the boys watch the jackass she comes home with and start to imitate him. The cycle continues—”
He jerked forward suddenly as if elbowed in the gut, his eyes going wide behind his sunglasses.
“What is it?” Tick asked, but then he remembered.
Rabbit felt a horrible sudden coldness inside of him, and gasped out a quick Excuse me. Dropping the cigarette, he turned and hurried toward the long corridor that led to the restrooms. Tick shook his head slowly, thinking If they always upset his stomach, why does he always start up again? Always?
He nodded slightly to the piped-in muzak he didn’t consciously notice was playing, and thought about the sweeping generalization Rabbit had just made, and how it didn’t apply to everybody. He made a note to tell him that when he got out.
A moment passed and his cell phone rang. There was only one person it could be, since hardly anyone had these fancy new things yet, except for people like him. He rolled his eyes, expecting to be asked to run go get Imodium.
“Yello?”
“Tick! There’s a big guy coming out with a green shirt and a baseball cap on backwards. The shirt says STP. Grab him!”
“What? What do you mean ‘grab him’?”
“Grab him and put him in the van and take him to the house in the woods! I’ll meet you there!”
“Are you serious? We have a lot to do today.”
Blue Tick saw a guy that matched the description coming out of the corridor, and sizing him up quickly, he saw the guy could fight to some extent, but not with any real skill, and he was a bit arrogant. He sighed, thinking Not again. Not now.
Rabbit had already hung up, so Tick followed the guy out to where the cars were parked.
Maybe an hour later, that guy was tied to a chair and telling Tick what would happen if he wasn’t let go this minute, and the little man with the moviestar hair came in. The guy stared.
“You!”
“Yeah,” Rabbit said. “Me.”
“What the hell’s going on here? You got—”
“Shut up until I’m finished talking, asshole. Since you are officially a captive audience, you’re going to listen hard to my question and give me an honest-to-God answer or I’m going to kill you, right now.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve got you tied to a chair.”
The guy swallowed hard.
“Now, in that bathroom, there were five urinals. Five. And one stall. Why in God’s name if there were five urinals did you have to piss, standing up, all over the toilet instead?”
“Is that what this is about?”
“Yeah, it is. Because I had to wait for you, I almost made a mess all over myself, and you didn’t even need to be there. And when you came out, the entire seat was wet. You couldn’t lift the lid? You couldn’t clean it off? You left your piss all over the place for me to clean up before I could sit down, and you gave me that little smirk of Go fuck yourself as you were walking out because you knew I was temporarily handicapped and couldn’t whup your ass until I got out of that stall. So what is it? Are you a dog marking your territory?”
“Oh my God. I can’t believe—”
Rabbit reached behind him up under his jacket and pulled out a James Bond-style Walther PPK with obligatory silencer, and put it to the man’s forehead.
“Can you believe it now?”
The man shut up, his eyes crossed looking up at the barrel.
“So think very hard. Why did you do it?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“That’s a child’s answer to an angry parent. Act like a man and take responsibility. Act like your life depends on it.”
“I…I don’t like to go in the urinal. I don’t want faggots to see my dick.”
Rabbit and Blue Tick both rolled their eyes, and the smaller man backed off with the gun.
“If that’s the best you can do, then we’ll give you a taste of your own medicine. Tick, pee on him.”
“…What?” Blue Tick asked.
“You heard me. Right in his ugly face. And get some in his hair, too. And on his shirt.”
“You pee on him.”
“I already went, remember? I got nothing left.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious.”
“But why?”
“Because he has to learn, and if I let him off easy, he’ll just go and do it again. You know what they say: lessons not learnt in blood are soon forgotten. He has to know that his actions affect other people, and think about how he might just ruin somebody else’s day with something as careless as this.”
“But we’re going to kill him either way.”
The captive’s eyes went even wider.
“Yeah, but I’ve been reading this philosopher lately who says that if reincarnation is real, and we die under especially unpleasant circumstances, we will carry that memory into our next life. By that rationale, this guy will enter his next life with an emphatic surety that pissing on toilet seats is not just wrong, but a really bad idea, without a conscious memory of why, and maybe he will teach his children not to do it, and the world will be a slightly better place.”
“Don’t we have to be somewhere?”
“Quit trying to change the subject.”
The giant man heaved a sigh, making a big production of obeying reluctantly, which was comical considering his size in comparison to Rabbit’s. Gnashing his teeth, he unzipped his pants. The captive tensed up and held his breath, scrunching his eyes and mouth shut, and braced himself.
The leaves of trees outside rattled against the house, and the ticking of the second hand on Rabbit’s watch was suddenly very loud, five ticks going by before the man in the chair’s eyes cracked open ever so slightly.
“Well?” Rabbit asked.
“I can’t,” Tick said quietly.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“What do you think I mean? I can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“He’s…he’s looking at it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“You can stop looking at it, too, yunno.”
“You’re three hundred twenty pounds of muscle and you can’t pee on a guy because he’s looking at you. That’s rich.”
“I ain’t doing this,” the big man said, tucking himself hurriedly back in and sulking while Rabbit shook his head.
The guy strapped to the chair was starting to chuckle, until Rabbit put his gun to the sweaty forehead and muttered “This is your lucky day, after all.”
And pulled the trigger.
The sound of the exit wound was louder than the ping! of the suppressed gunshot, but both were drowned out by the collective gasp from the other people tied-up to chairs in the room.
“I gotta be somewhere,” Rabbit said, turning to face the five young men whose eyes bulged over gags that held their mouths shut. “But I’ll be back before long, so don’t get too comfortable.”
Rabbit came bopping out of a store in a shopping center, packing his cigarettes against his palm, and Blue Tick looked down at him and asked “Are you ready?” The little man with the snazzy suit and the moviestar hair grinned. He was nervous and trying not to show it, and anybody else would’ve been fooled, but Tick had been his henchman for years, and knew better.
“When’d you start smoking again?”
“I’m not. I’m just going to have a few because she smokes, and I can’t stand the smell or the taste of a smoker if I’m not smoking too.”
“Good thinking,” the muscle-bound skinhead said, nodding, hoping his sarcasm wasn’t too subtle.
Rabbit lit the first cigarette and took a long drag to get into character. His expression grew thoughtful.
“Yunno what I heard someone say a minute ago? It was a bit disturbing. ‘The children of single mothers grow up knowing what’ll get them laid.’ I had to think about that for a bit. But yeah, if Mom’s coming home with some new guy all the time, the girls see how she acts and, when they come of age, follow her example, and the boys watch the jackass she comes home with and start to imitate him. The cycle continues—”
He jerked forward suddenly as if elbowed in the gut, his eyes going wide behind his sunglasses.
“What is it?” Tick asked, but then he remembered.
Rabbit felt a horrible sudden coldness inside of him, and gasped out a quick Excuse me. Dropping the cigarette, he turned and hurried toward the long corridor that led to the restrooms. Tick shook his head slowly, thinking If they always upset his stomach, why does he always start up again? Always?
He nodded slightly to the piped-in muzak he didn’t consciously notice was playing, and thought about the sweeping generalization Rabbit had just made, and how it didn’t apply to everybody. He made a note to tell him that when he got out.
A moment passed and his cell phone rang. There was only one person it could be, since hardly anyone had these fancy new things yet, except for people like him. He rolled his eyes, expecting to be asked to run go get Imodium.
“Yello?”
“Tick! There’s a big guy coming out with a green shirt and a baseball cap on backwards. The shirt says STP. Grab him!”
“What? What do you mean ‘grab him’?”
“Grab him and put him in the van and take him to the house in the woods! I’ll meet you there!”
“Are you serious? We have a lot to do today.”
Blue Tick saw a guy that matched the description coming out of the corridor, and sizing him up quickly, he saw the guy could fight to some extent, but not with any real skill, and he was a bit arrogant. He sighed, thinking Not again. Not now.
Rabbit had already hung up, so Tick followed the guy out to where the cars were parked.
Maybe an hour later, that guy was tied to a chair and telling Tick what would happen if he wasn’t let go this minute, and the little man with the moviestar hair came in. The guy stared.
“You!”
“Yeah,” Rabbit said. “Me.”
“What the hell’s going on here? You got—”
“Shut up until I’m finished talking, asshole. Since you are officially a captive audience, you’re going to listen hard to my question and give me an honest-to-God answer or I’m going to kill you, right now.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’ve got you tied to a chair.”
The guy swallowed hard.
“Now, in that bathroom, there were five urinals. Five. And one stall. Why in God’s name if there were five urinals did you have to piss, standing up, all over the toilet instead?”
“Is that what this is about?”
“Yeah, it is. Because I had to wait for you, I almost made a mess all over myself, and you didn’t even need to be there. And when you came out, the entire seat was wet. You couldn’t lift the lid? You couldn’t clean it off? You left your piss all over the place for me to clean up before I could sit down, and you gave me that little smirk of Go fuck yourself as you were walking out because you knew I was temporarily handicapped and couldn’t whup your ass until I got out of that stall. So what is it? Are you a dog marking your territory?”
“Oh my God. I can’t believe—”
Rabbit reached behind him up under his jacket and pulled out a James Bond-style Walther PPK with obligatory silencer, and put it to the man’s forehead.
“Can you believe it now?”
The man shut up, his eyes crossed looking up at the barrel.
“So think very hard. Why did you do it?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“That’s a child’s answer to an angry parent. Act like a man and take responsibility. Act like your life depends on it.”
“I…I don’t like to go in the urinal. I don’t want faggots to see my dick.”
Rabbit and Blue Tick both rolled their eyes, and the smaller man backed off with the gun.
“If that’s the best you can do, then we’ll give you a taste of your own medicine. Tick, pee on him.”
“…What?” Blue Tick asked.
“You heard me. Right in his ugly face. And get some in his hair, too. And on his shirt.”
“You pee on him.”
“I already went, remember? I got nothing left.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious.”
“But why?”
“Because he has to learn, and if I let him off easy, he’ll just go and do it again. You know what they say: lessons not learnt in blood are soon forgotten. He has to know that his actions affect other people, and think about how he might just ruin somebody else’s day with something as careless as this.”
“But we’re going to kill him either way.”
The captive’s eyes went even wider.
“Yeah, but I’ve been reading this philosopher lately who says that if reincarnation is real, and we die under especially unpleasant circumstances, we will carry that memory into our next life. By that rationale, this guy will enter his next life with an emphatic surety that pissing on toilet seats is not just wrong, but a really bad idea, without a conscious memory of why, and maybe he will teach his children not to do it, and the world will be a slightly better place.”
“Don’t we have to be somewhere?”
“Quit trying to change the subject.”
The giant man heaved a sigh, making a big production of obeying reluctantly, which was comical considering his size in comparison to Rabbit’s. Gnashing his teeth, he unzipped his pants. The captive tensed up and held his breath, scrunching his eyes and mouth shut, and braced himself.
The leaves of trees outside rattled against the house, and the ticking of the second hand on Rabbit’s watch was suddenly very loud, five ticks going by before the man in the chair’s eyes cracked open ever so slightly.
“Well?” Rabbit asked.
“I can’t,” Tick said quietly.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“What do you think I mean? I can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“He’s…he’s looking at it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“You can stop looking at it, too, yunno.”
“You’re three hundred twenty pounds of muscle and you can’t pee on a guy because he’s looking at you. That’s rich.”
“I ain’t doing this,” the big man said, tucking himself hurriedly back in and sulking while Rabbit shook his head.
The guy strapped to the chair was starting to chuckle, until Rabbit put his gun to the sweaty forehead and muttered “This is your lucky day, after all.”
And pulled the trigger.
The sound of the exit wound was louder than the ping! of the suppressed gunshot, but both were drowned out by the collective gasp from the other people tied-up to chairs in the room.
“I gotta be somewhere,” Rabbit said, turning to face the five young men whose eyes bulged over gags that held their mouths shut. “But I’ll be back before long, so don’t get too comfortable.”
