Broken Piano for President (4 page)

“Why are you telling us?” Henry asks.

“So it won’t die with me. Everyone else who knows is gone now.”

Winters claims his world famous hamburger concoction is little more than Grade-F beef and nicotine. A secret, Henry realizes, that will destroy Winters Olde-Tyme Hamburgers. Christopher Winters is no longer a harmless grandfather.

“I’m just an old man with a guilty conscience.” His hands shake, jiggling a few ounces of bourbon into a glass.

“Uhm, we have to be on our way soon.” Henry knows his moment to transition from bun to beef has arrived. His chest aches with the decision. “Is there anything else we should know, sir?”

“You don’t believe me do you, Orca? Here I am, handing God’s largest mammal history on a platter. I’m giving him a Pulitzer like I was
given
the governorship. And, instead, he just wags his tongue, hoping for another bucket of fish.”

“Are…are you getting all this, Tony?” Hamler nervously chatters, hands moving wild.

Tony nods.

“Afraid of that.” Henry drags his feet to the enormous window behind Mister Winters. The interviewer rests a palm on the cold glass. Lonely manicured shrubs are the only thing moving. Nobody is on the estate grounds to see what comes next.

“You don’t care.” Winters’ lips are sloppy with whiskey. “Nobody listens to old men anymore.”

Henry stands behind the aging governor. The nervous journalist tugs out a silver cufflink and reads Tony’s eyes. The cufflink is the signal to end the interview. “You’d be surprised, Mister Winters,” Henry says, fiddling with its black pearl as his guts drop down a roller coaster. “Your son, Roland, listens to everyone.”

Standing over the corporate icon, Henry watches the old man’s smooth scalp wrinkle in a shock of recognition. “Roland sent you?”

Hamler’s round stomach brushes against Winters’ spine. The skin under Henry’s beard scorches,
arm folds
wobble.

He freezes.

“Oh dear,” whispers the most famous man in America.

Tony takes a few steps toward them with a father’s disappointed eyes. “Cut, cut. Just a second, sir, let me adjust the…lights.”

With shaking fingers, Henry slips off the cufflink’s casing, revealing a tiny syringe. “Wait, no, I’ve got it,” Henry says, groaning deep and sad before slamming a needle into Winters’ neck.

Dean watches the green-eyed blonde dab her forehead and squint. His breath unravels through the cold air. He’s holding the screwdriver, but doesn’t remember fetching it.

In the shadow of Bust-A-Gut’s dome, nearby traffic evaporates into silence. Luckily, it’s early and the restaurant parking lot is still empty. Sun lifts above the blue and yellow hump, barely warming Dean’s cheeks. He and the bloody woman are alone as she clicks open the door, never lifting her eyes off that whittled-down Phillips head.

The hangover king is having a tough time deciding whether his troubles are over or just getting started. He realizes it doesn’t matter much—they both suck.

Dean’s heart rate kicks gunpowder fast watching this ghost. Just a minute ago, she was dead. He is certain. His tongue gropes for just the right words to say: “I’m ninety-nine percent sure I didn’t kill you.” But they don’t arrive, watching her rise on wobbly black heels.

This woman is tall. She could easily rest her chin on Deshler’s skull if they were slow-dancing. But instead of the waltz, she leans against the car’s frame, holding fingers to the deep wound. The pieces of blonde hair not globbed together with blood erupt off her head in fireworks. Her expensive clothes are bunched awkward. A floaty black top nudges the curves around shoulders. A black skirt ratchets tight to her hips. But all in a wrecked imitation of how everything probably looked the night before.

As usual, in times of panic, Dean’s mind drifts toward music. This gory scene again reminds him of that long ago concert with his brother and a flask of schnapps.
Blood can be art
, he thinks, trying to settle down.
Guts and bile and violence can be art. What if this whole mess was a performance piece?

Remember Gibby?

The night they took Deshler’s father away, after Mom cried herself to sleep, Dean and his brother snuck out. They arrived just in time to hear the Butthole Surfers crush through a handful of heavy, druggy tunes with dangerous amounts of feedback. Dizzying layers of echo.

The concert was a punch in the face. A bloody nose of volcanic proportions. Everyone in the room
had
to listen. There was no choice. Nowhere to hide. Teenage Dean quickly realized that music was the only way anyone would listen to guys like him and Gibby.

The Butthole Surfers’ lead singer, Gibby Haynes, stole the show. The image is still barbecued into Dean’s memory: the lanky frontman crawling around the stage, half-naked, smearing fake blood across his body and face while the band pounded out an acid-soaked psychedelic mess. Strobe lights force-fed seizures. A cheap smoke machine burped white until the band was draped in fog.

Dean, like the rest of the crowd, couldn’t stop watching. His heart jumped when Haynes pulled the microphone to his lips. The man was all stringy black hair and wide, serial killer eyes. Young Deshler listened to every twisted gurgle of words, hypnotized. Haynes spat fire and flung gooey red corn syrup all over the audience.

That blood.

After the show, Dean couldn’t stop thinking about the red ooze. He couldn’t stop thinking how a thousand people stood lobotomized, listening the way Dad never did. He couldn’t stop thinking about the power a stage demands.

Later that night, when the flask was nothing but tin and fumes, Dean’s older brother explained, between hiccups, that the concert was about expression. It all had meaning. It’s all art.

Dean has been chasing that vision of art ever since. Looking to smear blood and breathe fire until they listen. The rumble it makes in his guts is enough to put up with parking all those cars, dealing with unenthusiastic bandmates, and the booing. God, all those boos. All that booze. It’s enough to make a man optimistic after potentially stabbing a stranger.

The woman inspects her sticky red hand and flashes it to Deshler in disbelief. Blood streaks down the wrist as her eyes squeeze tight. “You know the odds of someone murdering you are something like three hundred twenty five-to-one.”

“I think you have the wrong idea.” Performance art fantasies blow into hazy smoke rings.

Less than a block away, morning traffic thickens with honks and raging stereo sounds. A naturally confused look plants itself on Deshler’s face—mouth hanging down.

One of her green eyes pops open—a marble in the light. “But your odds of suicide are more like a hundred twenty one-to-one.” Her lips and cheeks offer a vague outline of makeup. A face that took an hour to put on, flooded by a thin layer of mummified blood.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Basically, we’re a way bigger danger to ourselves than others are.”

“I…I don’t think I did.” He points to the bloody hair tangle and his belly shrinks. “
That.
” Dean cringes, waiting for her scream.

That waiting kills.

She giggles and sighs. “I think I’m still a little drunk, Dean.” Smiling wide, the girl shifts her weight forward and trips. She digs a bare knee into naked soil. “Owee,” she laughs, “gimme the keys, please.”

“I don’t have any—” Deshler quickly checks pockets and stops, waiting for more words to come. “Keys.”

“Shut up. Seriously, I don’t feel very good. I think I hit my head on something.” She stretches and yawns until cavity fillings shine amongst the blooming light. The woman steps close and gives Dean a faint, flirty look. Dean’s muscles loosen. Fears of prison now completely vanished.

In the time it takes to stab a pretty girl in the head, this turns into one of the Cliff Drinker’s finer hangover mornings.

• Dozens of Times
  Waking up in his own bed, alone.
  

It happens much less than he’d like, but Deshler pushes out a boozy breath of relief when he sees the Listerine yellow walls of his apartment. He’s never done the math, but its likelihood is somewhere around thirty-five percent.

• Eleven Months Ago
  His Roommate Henry’s Trunk
  .
  

Neither he nor Henry knows how Deshler ended up in the locked trunk. However, Dean considers it a success, since after kicking the metal shell for twenty minutes to grab Henry’s attention, Deshler found thirty dollars in his pocket that wasn’t there before.

• Countless Times
  Any booth, barstool or bathroom floor, as long as it’s attached to the bar he started drinking in.
  

“I don’t want to be rude,” Deshler says, slipping the screwdriver into his jacket pocket. “But we’ve never met before, have we?” He instantly regrets not playing cool, coaxing more faint, flirty looks.

“Jesus, you don’t think
I
,” she stabs a finger into her chest. “Know who you are?” The woman squints and shakes in disbelief.

What would Gibby do
? he thinks and notices for the first time his cheeks are numb.

“Listen, nothing personal,” one lonely step toward her. “Ehrm, I just don’t remember a lot about last night. I had a little too much to drink.”