The Wrong Man (6 page)
Authors: Matthew Louis
Tommy said, “Okay,” and I could see those mad wheels spinning in his head. I knew he would keep his cell phone turned off for the next week or two.
I drove him back to his gas station. At every new landmark he asked me to turn here, it would only take a minute, he needed to stop at his friend’s house, or a girl’s house, or an enemy’s house because they owed him money or had some drugs or a five-hundred-dollar motorcycle helmet or a pneumatic nail gun that he needed to pick up. I gave him a flat
no
each time. I explained to him that I had to get myself home.
I had to work tonight.
7
I
had
settled
on
a plan, or rather, a plan had percolated up from my subconscious. As I drove home to get cleaned up for work, I began entertaining a fantasy of Owen walking into Vanguard like he had two nights ago, attempting to intimidate me, to slap me around. I imagined myself just thrusting the gun into his face and clenching the trigger, bursting the back of his head out like the cap popping off a shaken up soda bottle, spraying blood and brain matter ten feet behind him before he slumped into a boneless pile on the maroon floor mat. I would claim self defense. I would say he was trying to rob the store. I would say I found the pistol in the bushes outside and the cops would never be able to prove different. There might be a trial, I might get charged with some watered-down violent crime, but I would know for the rest of my life that I had executed the son of a bitch who had raped my girlfriend.
I wanted to be attacked, that was my entire plan; and, once attacked, I wanted to lash out with righteous and devastating force and kill Owen Ferguson. It amounted to a kind of jujitsu; it relieved me of the tension and responsibility of being the aggressor, allowed me to react rather than initiate.
And now I was armed for that reaction. I put on my old brown derby jacket that had been a favorite garment for too many years. It was separating at the seams, the pocket linings were shredded, the collar frayed. But I stood before a mirror wearing it, with the pistol in the right pocket and the knuckles in the left, and it made sense. The pockets had zippers so I could keep the weapons in place, and my hands were practiced at finding the tab and slipping the zipper down. I went through a couple of practice draws and found the pistol slid free without snags and was in the open air, ready to kill in a few heartbeats—although it caught on the strips of torn lining and pulled the pocket inside out.
But nothing happened. The shift crawled by peacefully. Several times my heart began jumping as I thought I saw Owen’s car rolling up, but it was always a cheap imitation. I called Jill at her mother’s at
and was told by her stepfather that she was out somewhere and she would call me back. She never called and it set my nerves on edge, left me agitated and reckless. I closed the store at ten, activated the alarm and let myself out. I locked the door and turned back toward my car in the empty parking lot, only then seeing the two of them advance.
They were both Mexican, wearing the gangland uniform, the combination cholo and black gangsta gear—both in baggy pants and baseball caps and oversized T-shirts. And they were coming on fast.
It was no good. I wanted Owen, but he sensed, maybe, how close to the edge I was. Or maybe he wanted to show me that I was light-work, that beating down a white punk like me was beneath him. Whatever had happened, he had elected to send these two thugs, probably paid them in coke or pot, maybe just said he’d consider it a favor if that one white boy who works at Vanguard got his ass beat.
I watched them strutting and rolling toward me in the dark parking lot, their arms wide, hands open, bodies loose and ready for action. I stood still until they were ten feet off and then I slid the zipper down, took out the thirty-eight and extended it toward them.
They stopped mid-step. A car whisked by on the street beyond the shrubbery. A parking lot light rained down on the empty pavement behind them and turned them into silhouettes. One was anorexically thin, the other thick but strong, a weightlifter under a layer of fat with the proud posture and jerky energy of a gamecock.
The same light making the gangsters into silhouettes must have made my every detail visible to them. I was aware of my pocket lining hanging out, and a part of me wanted to put the gun in the other hand and stuff it back in so I didn’t look like a jackass, but I thought they might jump at me in that moment. Instead, as I’ve seen done in so many movies, I cocked the pistol with my thumb. That ominous
click
had the expected, dramatic effect.
But I didn’t feel like Clint Eastwood when I spoke. I could hear my voice quavering. “I’ll just fuckin’ shoot you guys and tell the cops everything that’s happened. It’ll be self defense. If you want to die I don’t give a fuck.”
I heard the skinny one breathe,
“Fu-u-uck!”
but the gamecock shook his head sadly and said, “Damn, Homes. You just fucked up bad. You was just gonna get beat down. Now you’re dead, aye.”
I moved the gun a little. “Not tonight I’m not.”
They had a quick exchange in Spanish and then the gamecock pointed at me. “You just made it a thousand times worse for yourself, white bread.”
When the Mexican kids used to call me “white bread” in school, I always answered by calling them “toast.” It crossed my mind but cute comebacks seemed asinine just now. I just kept the gun extended and waited.
The stout gangster finally hit the skinny one on the shoulder and started turning away.
I kept the gun extended.
“Later, bitch,” the gamecock said, and I almost shot him in the back as he strutted off. I kept the gun trained on them as they rounded the building out of sight, but as much as I wanted to show Owen how afraid he ought to be, I couldn’t just squeeze that trigger. I was nothing but relieved as the two thugs disappeared from my view.
I kept the gun in my hand as I started my car, and kept it beside me as I drove home. I slept on the couch with the gun on the coffee table, after making a madman’s door chime out of a pan and some silverware tied together with a shoelace and hung on the doorknob. If anyone tried to open the door the racket would wake me up and as soon as their head leaned in I’d squeeze off a round and their skull would flatten to a blanket of dark blood on the wall.
Or so I fantasized. Nobody came to the door. The night passed in shallow and fitful sleep and I found myself awake at dawn, staring at the ceiling. I lay there for an hour, until my cell phone, next to my keys on the coffee table, began ringing.
“Hi, Sam,” Jill said. Her voice was a little gravelly. So was mine. It was
.
“Hey, are you okay? Have you
. . . talked to anyone? You still at your mom’s?”
There was two seconds of silence. “Yeah, I’m at my mom’s. I went to the police. I had to go to Blackmer for that. And I was examined by a doctor.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m still pregnant. Everything’s normal.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had, in truth, shoved this out of my mind. It was just too much for me to factor in. It wasn’t real. How could we have a kid? How could we pretend like it was a good idea when this black cloud had settled over our lives?
“Sam?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“Aren’t you relieved about that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yes! Of course I am!”
I could hear her sniffling tears back. “What happened doesn’t change
anything
for me
.
It shouldn’t change anything for you either!”
“Jill!” I said. “It doesn’t. Listen, everything’s going to be fine, okay? I just need to get my head straight a little. Are you okay otherwise?”
“I’m perfectly fine.”
I told her she just needed to sit tight and get better and I’d find us a new place real soon. I told her I was coming to see her in an hour or two, but she said to wait. It was my night off and she suggested we see a movie, have dinner and try to be normal. She needed it right now, she said. I agreed even as I scoffed to myself.
Try to be normal?
I thought. My heart was thudding, slowly and heavily, as if it resented the effort. My mind was repeating Owen Ferguson’s name like a primitive war chant and sweat had broken out at my hairline. Me having a kid. And the mother of my child raped. And me knowing who did it and trying to be
normal.
When she hung up I tossed the cell onto the coffee table, picked up my gun, rose and headed toward the shower. I had shined off my classes yesterday, but my conscience nagged. I had paid the money; I had bragged that I would make something of myself. Jill didn’t want to see me this morning anyway and I was going to start upending tables and smashing windows if I just sat here. What the hell.
Blackmer’s extension of
Morse
Junior College
in
Del
Mar was held in what had once been the city post office—an old building that would shudder and crumble and crush us all to death if there happened to be an earthquake of any magnitude. No big loss. I sat in the back, my pummeled face clean shaven, my hair combed, and nobody spent too much time looking at me.
I was at a desk that might have been manufactured in 1962, staring at Ms. Hatley-Lester—the self-assured, crewcut, flat-chested instructor—as she droned on in a masculine monotone about how our whole reality was manufactured by the “controlled mass media.” The class was called Twenty-First Century Social Problems with a textbook of the same name that I had paid thirty bucks for, and its aim was to let me know that, by the way, pal, you’re a slave. There is no government, there’s nobody looking out for you, there’s just a bunch of demonic power players pulling strings, consolidating power, butchering children. Sometimes she showed us documentaries that were at once so convincing and logical, and so opposed to everything I thought I knew, that I came away feeling like my own name might be a lie.
Today, after the introductory monologue, the room was darkened and an old video tape, that must have been shown to dozens of classes to date, was popped into a VCR that lived on a wheeled metal stand with “MJC” stencilled onto it. The subject of the movie was going to be the invasion of
Panama
in the ’80s and the disparity between what had actually happened and what our filthy, sick-minded, hell-spawned excuse for a government and its lapdog media told us had happened.
The movie got underway. There was a silhouette of a woman and the quiet sound of her speaking whatever language they speak in
Panama
, and then the translator’s voice overlapping at full volume, “The shooting began at
. . .”
I couldn’t sit still. I didn’t disbelieve the documentary and I wasn’t offended by it, I just didn’t give a shit. I was thinking about having a kid in a few short months. I was thinking of walking around with Jill when her stomach grew round and heavy, and then walking with a stroller in front of us, and then me acting out the role of father for the next two decades and always looking at my family and remembering,
knowing
.
I had something growing in me too, expanding in my chest and in my braincase so I had to shut my eyes tight and try to catch my breath. But it wouldn’t stop. It was taking on a more distinct shape, moment by moment, and now it was starting to kick.
I grabbed up my book and notepad and stood. I didn’t look around, just floated toward the door and then I was in the bright hallway, moving toward the exit. I patted my pocket, not my right but my left, and squeezed my hand around the knuckles through the material of my jacket.
Somewhere along the way, living in this town most of my life, I acquired the knowledge of where Owen Ferguson’s family lived. It was an old Victorian from Blackmer’s heyday, now decaying in a decaying neighborhood on
Third Street
. I had passed the place a thousand times over the years and I always thought of Owen when I did. Six or eight years ago, when Owen himself had lived here, I used to see him coming or going, maybe leaning up against his lowered car outside, his body pressed against that of a girl with brown skin and hair frozen stiff and tall by Aqua Net. Very occasionally Owen and I had made eye contact and once he even acknowledged me with an upward jerk of his eyebrows and a quiet, “What’s up.”
I had seen his mother from time to time too. A rough-hewn, middle aged white lady, thick at the waistline with deflated cleavage and raunchy clothes. She had a craggy face and frazzled yellow hair with dark roots. Owen’s biological father was a mystery and his stepfather long gone to prison, but he had a half brother, Ramón, and, as I was to learn, a six-year-old half sister.
