OLD ORDNANCE
Crates. I’m hopeful that for my trouble, one arm tourniqueted with baling twine and useless for now, that they contain something wondrous like RPGs or, at least AKs, something the psychos in ski masks would buy, pay big money for.
I pry-bar one open, one-handed. Then another. But they all contain the earliest M-16s, useless fuckers. Everyone knew they jammed, but then the conditions in desert country were so different than in Vietnam. At least the humidity wouldn’t be what shut them off in mid-burst. The lame ammo probably would.
Brand new, packed in Cosmoline, all these years. Where’d they come from? Kennedy was alive and banging Marilyn Monroe when these things were assembled. Willmarth had just said ordnance, crates of it.
They looked cool. Like in that old photo op for Kerry back then, flak jacket, helmet straps hanging unbuckled. Run for president stuff. Except Clinton and Bush both sidestepped the shit, became president without the cool photo. Dodged all the bullets. And Obama. What a laugh. Fuck ’em all but eight, six to carry you, two to pull the wagon, as my old man used to say.
If Willmarth sells these antiques to the camel-fuckers, it’s no more a crime than Holder running guns to the cartels. If they buy them. Maybe they’re not quite that dumb. Then I’m stuck with twenty-two crates of worthless fullies that a good sandstorm will make into fine doorstops.
My arm hurts. Slug must’ve hit a bone before it exited. I can work for hours with one arm loading these crates on a flatbed trailer, cover them with hay bales. If I don’t pass out. But I don’t have hours. Or I can just leave them for the rednecks who probably thought they’d won the Kansas lottery. This was to be my score. I’m too old for this shit. Who tipped those shitkickers off?
Those guys in the platform pickups’ll be back. And they’ll bring the hoo-raw boys with them. I don’t think I killed anyone, but one of the trucks drove off on a rim throwing sparks, and the back windows imploded on both vehicles when I fired left-handed. But they kept going.
They have cellphones. I don’t have time. If I had two good arms I could load these fuckers. I can hear my old man, “If a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass a’hoppin.” Get the hell outta here while you can.
The ER will call a cop if I just walk in. I’ll call Willmarth. He’s got a vet who works quiet for cash. Shit, just shoot me. I’m out the crates, have to hide my truck, leave the trailer, pay the vet for a patch-up. I could cry. This was gonna be my trip to Mexico, live like a king. If the arm’s too fucked up, I’ll have to get it fixed. Medicare’s gonna love that.
Oh shit, headlights. Oh, bigger shit, red and blue flashers.
The car’s lights follow the ground, disappearing in the slight draws, aiming at the sky as it crests the hillocks. Then it’s on me. I’m dizzy, maybe loss of blood. I’m looking at free meals the rest of my life. Prison doc will patch me up good, if he’s not a hack. Never thought it would end this way. If only I had come earlier. My old man chimes in again. “Junior, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas.”
The spotlight is on me. I lace my fingers on my head. The pain ratchets up in my right arm, oh God. A voice says, “What’s up, Junior?”
I know this cop. It’s RC. We were drafted about the same time way back then. I knew he was county now but only had a beer with him once. It’s not like we’re buddies. He’s past retirement age.
“What you got in there, Junior?”
“Twenty two cases M-16s. Early ones.”
“16s. Where’d they come from?”
“No idea. Some armory but back in the day. Untraceable.”
“You got a buyer?”
“Guy in Texas. Unless he don’t want the old 16s.”
“16s’ll sell.” Then he laughs, says, “The Nichols boys are scared shitless, said there was an army out here, a militia that fired on them. They was out here looking to steal a four-wheeler. Admitted it. Said they fired back with .22s but was outmanned, outgunned. They didn’t say anything about crates.”
“Now what?”
“Were you working this alone?”
“That was my plan,” I say.
“Change it.” He looks at me with no expression, hand resting on his holstered gun butt. Just a place to keep his hand though, I can tell it’s not threatening. Snap’s still shut.
“Okay.”
“Now, let’s get you to a doc with this accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“What about the Nicholses?”
“In the cooler for the night. Drunk and baked both. When we come back here, you can watch me load that trailer.”
“I figure hay bales on it, and down to McAllen, Texas,” I say.
“Sounds good. Get in.”
“Crates be okay?”
“Owner’s gone, asked me to look in now and then. They’ll be fine as frog’s hair.”
“You talk like my old man,” I say and get in.
At the ER, they say lucky it was a .22. Just nicked a bone, arteries okay.
RC turns the cop car in, end of shift, and we take his truck back out there with a twelve-pack. I call Willmarth. He says the old 16s are fine. He says, “Hell I could move Red Ryders with plastic stocks. Bring it.”
THE PERFORMANCE
They come in twos and threes, quietly, like Sioux to a sweat lodge that is unannounced; they just know so they come, mostly elders. Some are younger, all white men, wind and sun and past pains show in their faces, farmers, some are factory workers, a mechanic, a housepainter. The younger ones have connected with one another by cellphone. A dozen or so in all. They stand silently, waiting, by the old man’s barn. One of the younger ones starts to talk facetiously and is hushed by an elder. He tugs at his ball cap bill, shoves his hands into the pockets of his frayed Carhartt chore coat, hunches against the cold, eyes to the ground.
The old man emerges from his weathered shotgun house; only the outbuildings show any sign of recent care. He wears a long camelhair polo coat, belted in back, high collar, wide lapels. It is either highly fashionable or quite old, but looks new. He takes no notice of the group as he approaches the barn. A few inches of striped overalls show beneath the voluminous coat, the kind railroad workers used to wear. Well-worn, expensive work boots. His billed cap says Millett with a crosshair and Tactical beneath that. His eyes are expressionless.
They say he’s a witch. Not your Wiccan New Age type, but the kind who can be standing near you in his old rusty pipe corral, then suddenly fifty feet away on the peak of his barn, looking down, his odd coat ballooning out at the skirts in the wind. You felt a loss of time then, the air smelled like storm, and the hairs on your neck rose. They rise now when you think of it. You wonder if it happened at all.
He approaches the barn, eyes in triangular shadows under the bill of his cap. On the side of the barn is a worn spot in the red paint about three feet from the ground and some two feet in diameter. This is where the ball hits when he does what they’ve come and gathered quietly to see.
He stands in front of the spot, gazing at it. The wind kicks up and the sawgrass around his boots bends to the east. A plastic Walmart bag frees itself from some thistle in the pasture and dances toward the pond and surrounding woods.
He pulls a lavender-colored bag from inside his coat; it looks like a makeup bag his wife might use. He unzips it, and takes one of several tennis balls from it, tosses the bag aside. The green tennis ball he holds is worn and faded. He holds it in both hands now, like a pitcher before windup. He is about five feet from the barn. He throws the ball at the weathered spot and catches it as it bounces back, throws again, catches again, ponk-pup, ponk-pup. He throws faster and faster and the sounds begin to merge and smooth into small motor noise, and the old man whirls in place, perhaps levitates, one can’t be sure, and the ball may bounce off his blurred boots at times. He is connected to the barn by the ball’s energy, but now it’s all too fast to comprehend.
The thing, the…performance, is over. The old man stoops to pick up the lavender bag, drops the ball inside, zips it, and, without acknowledging the group, walks away toward the grey weathered house. The small group disperses, as quietly as they’d arrived, to their pickups and battered cars with different colored fenders and doors.
•
A silver Audi coupe pulls up in a swirl of gravel dust. Both doors open and two young men emerge, leaving the doors ajar. The man on the passenger side wears jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, and he is doing something with a video camera. The other man is in a sport coat and tie, and he hurries toward the old man with a microphone and a battery pack.
“Sir! Sir! Mr. Beels! We’re from KSTV and…” He yells, with a smile on his face. The old man turns to them as the cameraman catches up and aims the camera at him. The old man, still expressionless, produces an antique-looking small caliber revolver, possibly a .32, and points it in their direction. A shot snaps and the lens of the camera explodes.
The loose group of men who had come to watch the earlier performance are frozen in attitude, one holding a lit lighter, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, mouth open.
The old man says, “Get out of range, I’ll count ten. One, two…”
The two men bolt for the Audi, and it wheels about in the gravel, one door still open, the cameraman grabbing at it to close it. Three shots. Three dents appear in the license plate. The old man resumes walking to his house.
The other trucks and cars pull out slowly, some with turn signals flashing as they turn onto the road that brought them there.
G. Wise has been a creative director in advertising most of his working life. In his youth he put forth effort as a bull rider, ironworker, laborer, funeral home pickup person, bartender, truck driver, postal worker, ice house worker, and paving field engineer. A staid museum director called him raffish, which he enthusiastically embraced (the observation, not the director). Of course, he took up writing fiction.
His novel, Ruined Days, and short story collection, Resume Speed, will be published by Black Opal Books in 2015. His short story collection Night Train, Cold Beer won the H. Palmer Hall award in 2013, and publication by Pecan Grove Press.
Appeared in Crime Factory Review, Stymie, Telling Our Stories Press Anthology, Opium, Negative Suck, Newfound Journal, The MacGuffin, Imagination and Place Press Anthology, Verdad, Stickman Review, Snark (Illusion), Atticus Review, Dark Matter Journal, Writers Tribe Review, The Dying Goose, Amarillo Bay, HOOT, Santa Fe Writers Project, Prick of the Spindle, Gravel, Flyover Country Review, Cactus Press, Thrice Fiction Magazine, WORK Literary Magazine, Blacktop Passages, Best New Writers Anthology 2015, Randomly Accessed Poetics, Dirty Chai, Commuter Lit, and Hypertext Magazine.
Wise is a sculptor/writer educated at Westminster College, University of Arkansas, and Kansas City Art Institute. Tweet him @NoirBut. Some work can be seen at WiseSculpture.com.