Tales from the Crossroad, Volume 1 Read online

  He reached put his finger on the shotgun trigger, not liking the way that darkness moved, writhed, like a black silk sheet covering a bed full of snakes. He didn’t like the kinds of fantasies he felt coming, like a storm, with air tingling with electricity and smelling of too much water. He was an officer of the law. It was his job to quell disturbances of the peace. The shotgun came up against his shoulder. Willard and Ty were in the line of fire. His finger started pulling.

  A cry made him turn. It was Bobby, naked, a bloody hunting knife in hand, running down the road at him.

  The rage coming off of Bobby was worse than the heat of a forest fire. It dispelled the strangers’ darkness, brought the reality of death, the threat of pain, back into focus.

  Broker had never figured Bobby for a meth head, but then, he never thought the boy would have spent his life living next door to his widowed sister, either. Judging by the knife, it looked like those days were over.

  Broker fired low, hoping to take out Bobby’s legs, but didn’t do enough damage. He managed to block the downward stroke of Bobby’s knife hand with the gun barrel, but they both wound up falling to the road and scrambling.

  Willard and Giffy joined in the struggle, though Broker wasn’t sure who they were after or what they were trying to do. All four of them wound up with cuts from the blade.

  Doc finally pulled up, cried out, holding his hands palms out in supplication like he was pleading for his life, not theirs. Bobby screamed, pulled away, picked up the shotgun which had fallen from Broker’s hands in the fighting, and blasted a hole in the black man’s belly.

  The sound of the shotgun froze them all in place, except for Samuels, who fell back against his car and slid to the ground leaving a trail of blood across his hood.

  “Damn,” said Giffy.

  “Shit,” said Willard.

  Their curses snapped the spell of death for Broker, and he pulled his handgun out and emptied the clip in Bobby, Willard and Giffy. He went to the cruiser, where Ty was holding on to the steering wheel and staring at the Doc’s bloodied car. With a fresh clip in the pistol, he put two rounds in Ty’s head.

  Going back to the bodies, he snatched the shotgun out of Bobby’s slack hands. “You need to get home and get into some damn clothes,” he told him. To Willard and Giffy, he said, “Damn lot of use you boys were, today. Same for you, Ty,” he said to his deputy. And to Doc Samuels, he said, “Guess that’ll teach you to be making house calls.”

  Broker took a moment to survey the bodies. He breathed deep, and the cordite stung his nostrils and the roof of his mouth. The stuff oozing out of Doc’s gut raised a barnyard stink. He gazed down the road at the diminishing shapes of the three strangers and said, “Those boys are on a killing spree.”

  He went down on one knee and gently patted Willard’s leg. “We’ll get them.”

  The three boys in black were sitting at the Beaumont Boys’ Club booth by the time Broker finished with the crime scene and got back to town. Cindy was serving them coffee and Danish, though Broker didn’t think they’d like that kind of food. She was also teasing them about their clothes, about the impression they were bound to make in town, and asking if they had any place to stay for the night. She laughed a lot, and stood by the table with the coffee pot in hand when she was done though the strangers never touched their cups or plates, and didn’t even bother answering her.

  To Broker’s surprise, Giffy appeared by his side as he walked up to the booth.

  “She never flirts with me,” he said, showing no signs of a gunshot wound, or even resentment.

  “Can’t say I blame her,” Willard answered, bumping into Broker from the other side as he tried and failed to negotiate his bulk between booths and tables to keep up with the sheriff.

  “Excuse me, but I’ve got some business to take care of,” Giffy said, and surprised Broker by pulling the sheriff’s gun from its holster.

  Broker braced himself for the bullet he knew was coming, the bullet he’d been too slow and stupid and confused to prevent from being aimed at him.

  But instead of shooting Broker, Giffy went behind the counter, into the kitchen. The Mexican ran out. A shot rang out, and the Mexican fell against the counter, dropped behind it. Giffy came out and put two more in him, looked up, grinned.

  There was something that needed to be done. Broker turned to the strangers, walked up to the booth and said, “I need to take you boys in for questioning.”

  The strangers answered. Their thin, cartoonish lips didn’t move, their black eyes didn’t look up at him, their faces didn’t turn and their flesh never creased or folded into an expression. But Broker heard their voices, as clear as the town sirens when they warned of fire or flood or tornadoes. He went cold with the sudden realization that the three boys in black weren’t quite human, even though, now that he saw them up close, they bore a striking resemblance to people he knew. Cousins and uncles. His Mom, and Dad. That boy in the woods. Willard. Giffy. A strong resemblance, except for the glow.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” one of the strangers said.

  “We understand.”

  Broker shook his head, like that was going to get the fly-buzzing sound of their voices out of his head. “This isn’t about being perfect. It’s about murder.”

  Mrs. Jefferson walked in, followed by Bobby. Brother and sister showed no signs of violence, and Bobby was fully clothed. Even unusually neat.

  Doc Samuels came in next, giving everyone a nod and a smile.

  The Mexican stood up from behind the counter, ready to take an order.

  “What the hell,” Broker said, looking to everyone but the boys in black for an answer.

  “You’d like us if you got to know us,” a stranger said.

  “The hell I would,” Giffy said. He still had the gun and he brushed past the Mexican on his way to the table. “You look like three faggots and I ain’t queer.”

  “There’s no consequence,” a stranger said.

  “Nothing to fear.”

  “We’ll fix everything.”

  “Make everything right.”

  “Everything isn’t right,” Broker said. He stared at Giffy standing next to him, aiming his gun at the nearest stranger’s head. Giffy, who he’d shot, along with Willard. Everyone dead was back. Alive. As good as new. And he thought, everything really was right.

  “If you give us a chance, everything can stay right the way you like it,” a stranger offered.

  Broker took the gun from Giffy and shot the stranger sitting by the aisle in the face. In the instant before he pulled the trigger, he saw his father in the pale, stupid expanse of the boy’s visage.

  The stranger didn’t fall, didn’t bleed. There wasn’t even a hole in place of the nose where Broker had aimed and sent the bullet.

  A joke. This was all a practical joke. The gun wasn’t loaded, or firing blanks, or just making a loud sound and blowing smoke out of the barrel. He shot Willard and Giffy again to prove his suspicion.

  They went down, stayed still. Bled.

  Cindy screamed. The Mexican smiled. Doc Samuels laughed and said, “I’d like to give that a try, myself.”

  Mrs. Jefferson turned away and went to the kitchen, grabbing the Mexican by the hand and taking him along. “I’m just going to see if they need any help in the back.”

  Her brother Bobby took the last empty seat in the booth beside the boys in black and asked Cindy for a cup of coffee. Willard and Giffy got up, the wounds Broker had just given them gone.

  “Things sure have changed,” Giffy said, brushing his clothes like he didn’t quite believe he was still in them. “And then again, maybe they haven’t.”

  “See?” Willard said, slapping Broker on the back, “Change’ll do you good. Not everything different has got to be bad.”

  Broker started to say something back to Willard, but forgot what. Everything was all right, he thought. Changed. But not.

  “Can you ask for better?” a stranger asked.

  Willard too
k the gun from Broker’s hand. “You’ve just got to know how to deal with the way things are,” he said. He put the muzzle to Broker’s temple. Doc Samuels giggled. Cindy stared at the back of a stranger’s head and dropped the pot of coffee. “Let me show you how.”

  Broker closed his eyes.

  And when he opened them again, everything really was all right in the glow of the strangers’ pale and beautiful faces.

  Just like those boys in black said it would be.

  NOK

  by Gerard Houarner

  The squeal of a car’s brakes accompanied Antonio’s last, silent head-shot kill. He froze the video game at a moment of triumph: three bloody enemy soldiers lay across his path. The colorful scene on the television screen pulsed faintly, as if reverberating from the violent play.

  Mom had made him turn off the game’s combat sound effects, even though he used headphones. She didn’t want him losing touch with the real world in case something happened, but she also didn’t want to hear battle racket, as she called it. Often, when she looked in on him while he played a first-person shooter, she asked why he didn’t play another game.

  In the real world, someone had pulled up to the front of the house.

  Antonio looked out his bedroom window. An old Chevy sedan was parked on the street. A man in uniform came out, put on a cap, straightened his military jacket. He had a cluster of colorful ribbons on his chest, and the sun glinted off of his buttons. He looked neither up nor down the block, but straight at the front door. He opened the gate in the fence and walked slowly toward the house. Antonio thought the man knew he was being watched through the upstairs window, but didn’t want to make eye contact with a witness.

  Though the man had never visited their house before, Charlie, the family’s five-year-old collie in charge of the yard security, did not challenge him. In fact, Antonio was surprised to see Charlie run to the back of the house as the man made his way up the brick path and the porch stairs.

  Antonio returned to his spot in front of the television, sat down cross-legged and picked up the game controller. The doorbell rang.

  Antonio’s hands shook, and his fingers turned numb. He couldn’t fight his way out of an ambush and he died on the screen.

  A little while later, his mother’s stifled weeping rose through the cracks in the house’s silence like invisible, acrid smoke.

  After the man had left the house and driven off in his car, Antonio heard the pet door swing open and shut downstairs. Charlie’s nails tapped out the rhythm of his climb up the stairs before he trotted into Antonio's room. But instead of jumping all over the place or rambling through toys and laundry and books and papers until Antonio had to play with him, Charlie lay down against his hip and watched the video game.

  Antonio had started over, but he couldn't seem to get past the first few traps he'd mastered when he first got the game. Charlie fell asleep, his ribs pushing against Antonio’s leg with every breath, the heat of his body spreading through Antonio's thigh, to his belly and crotch, and all the way up to his neck.

  Then Antonio’s mother came upstairs. Her eyes were red. She turned off the television and sat on the edge of the bed, and then she told him his father was dead.

  His fourth grade class had studied Pompeii and Herculaneum that week, and what he'd come away with was the image of whole cities smothered in ash, consumed by fire, buried in stone and mud. He'd thought the ruins cool, and the volcano, too. They'd made one out of paper-mache with a few matchbox houses at the base, and thrown odd chemicals in to make lava flow.

  He also remembered the single, fleeting and accidental display of a picture of the cast made from the hollow left in solidified ash by someone who had been buried alive, and had died, and whose body had turned to dust but had left an empty place in the earth as a sign that he or she had once lived.

  He felt like that person, trapped in burning ash, suffocating.

  Charlie woke up and whined a little, and stood across Antonio's lap with his tail wagging furiously, huffing as if he'd just caught the scent of a wolf circling his flock.

  Antonio's mother cried some more and dragged Antonio to her, and Charlie stood and leaned against her legs and watched the door. Holding on to his mother, Antonio thought he should be crying, too, and he tried to let the tears come because his heart felt like it was going to burst and his lungs couldn't get enough air and his skin prickled from drops of falling, molten rock. But he couldn't.

  It seemed to him that his father was gone forever, and that he was also just about to step through the door and ask them all what they were crying about.

  There was a funeral when his father's body came back from where he'd died. The coffin was closed. Soldiers appeared. A bugler played Taps while the rest of the troop saluted, and one of their number pressed a carefully folded flag and a box with a medal into his mother's hands. There wasn't as much crying as Antonio thought there would be. Charlie couldn't come. He would have liked running through the grave markers. The grass smelled like it had just been cut, and the breeze was damp from the sprinklers running in the next section. A rainbow shimmered across the fields of regulation-sized markers, like tiny teeth erupting from the green earth.

  Antonio overhead the soldiers talking. They weren't sad or happy, but serious among all the graves, as if they'd seen their names etched in the stone. He overheard them talking about knocks, but he didn't understand, so he asked one of his uncles to explain what the soldiers were talking about.

  "Next of kin," his uncle said. "That's what we are. They abbreviate it to NOK. The military likes to abbreviate everything. Makes talking simpler."

  Antonio knew about abbreviations from school. And everybody knew about FUBAR. But he’d never heard of NOK. Of course, he’d never known anyone who died in the military in any of places his father had been assigned. And he supposed it wasn’t the kind of acronym people in military life liked to talk about.

  It occurred to him that the military had abbreviated his father's life. Shortened it to a series of tours of duty scattered across the country like seeds left to grow and bear fruit for others. All Antonio had left were a few memories standing in his mind like the capitalized first letters of a larger and more important concept, dark and lonely. There’d been that perfect Sunday afternoon at Wrigley field, with white uniforms against a green field beneath a blue sky. And the first time he’d tasted buttered popcorn. And watching his father march in formation in a parade, and realizing that grim speck was his father, and that his Dad belonged to a huge machine that moved like a mountain and could crush anything in its path.

  But his father’s death wasn't the military's fault. They didn't want their soldiers to die. They wanted the enemy soldiers to die. Someone else had wanted his father dead. The enemy. And this time, the enemy had won. It was the enemy that had abbreviated his father’s life.

  A cold breeze gusted through Antonio at the thought of the invisible, malicious enemy, wanting to kill his father. Didn’t the enemy realize Dad had a family that needed him?

  The news reports Antonio had barely watched so he wouldn't have to see what might be happening to his Dad suddenly felt desperately important. He wished he'd paid attention, even taped the news, so he could go back and decode the messages in the bombings and explosions, in the faces of the panting reporters as bullets flew around them, in the charts and maps journalists and soldiers referred to when they talked about the war from clean and quiet rooms. Maybe if he'd paid more attention, he could have seen what the enemy was up to and warned his father. Saved his life.

  Of course, that kind of thing happened only in fantasy, in movies or comics, not in real life. But even the fantastic possibility of such a thing happening burned inside him, like bottled up magma desperate to be vented.

  The simple reality was that the enemy had killed Dad, and there really was nothing he could have done about it. And now, he wasn't anyone's son, anymore.

  He was a NOK.

  After the service, everyone came b
ack home to eat and talk. Antonio went upstairs with a few cousins and the neighborhood army brats. They turned on the stereo and played video games with the sound on. Someone put a shooting game in the system, turned on the sound. Gunfire erupted over a mix of pop and rap songs. The crowd of kids in his room talking, laughing, jostling, dancing, play-fighting, handling his comics and CDs and toys, made him feel like Vesuvius watching cities grow around it.

  Charlie sat contentedly outside the door to his room, all his sheep penned.

  An uncle came in. He was wearing his dress military uniform. Without a word, he disconnected the game system and threw it out the window. It crashed against the brick path to the house and shattered.

  Charlie barked a few times, but backed away from the uncle as he left. The kids, quiet for the time an adult was in their midst, broke out into tense giggling and disbelieving gossiping. Antonio slipped out and went downstairs. The uncle who’d come upstairs helped himself to a small plate of roast beef and potato salad, then sat at a table of relatives while listening to the conversation, as if nothing had happened.

  Antonio turned to head back to his room, almost tripped over Charlie standing right behind him. Then an aunt appeared, out of nowhere – Melanie or Emily, he couldn’t remember -- and cradled his head in her hands and told him, “You’ve got to find a way to live through this, Antonio. Don’t get lost. Your father would want you to do well in school and go to college and have a good life. You can do that. For him. And for yourself.”

  Her words made all the things going on inside of him rumble and boil, and he had to go outside, Charlie close by at his heels, and sit on the far side of the tool shed and wait for something to blow out from him. The day wore on and people left. Charlie sat next to him.

  He never exploded. Finally, Antonio went back inside and counted up all the missing things from his room. While his mother cleaned up the house, he lay in bed remembering what his father looked like, without the uniform, and what he smelled like, and what they’d talked about when they were alone. Despite what his aunt had said, they’d never talked about school, work or college, or what kind of life he’d have. Mostly what they’d talked about were video games and music, how to handle kids and teachers in new schools and neighborhoods, and what it was like on his father’s job.