Someone Else's Love Story (10 page)

He shakes his head to clear it. Bridget’s priest has failed, spectacularly
. Anniversaries can open up old wounds,
he’d said. What an asshole. William is not a fan of metaphors; they are so often inaccurate.
William,
the priest should have said,
anniversaries are just like being vivisected.

The phone rings again. William was better a week ago, watching Paula drink up all his beer inside his quiet house. He was better twenty minutes ago, even, when he was angry with laundry soap. He was best of all a few breaths previous, calmly making an origami bird in the peace of knowing that a bullet belonged to him. He should stick with that.

But the desperate mother eyes of the girl with Bridget’s voice are telling him he needs to reprioritize. Young Bridget would agree. She’d say that what he wants doesn’t matter here. This girl and her child love each other. The little old couple, they love each other, too. Even the clerk with her disturbing front teeth must matter to someone, somewhere. He must get them all out of here, safely, and now teenage Bridget is more than a voice in his head. She is a presence. She is a haunting with an Irish temper, telling him to get up off his ass and fix it.

Fine. William draws white lines on a blackboard in his head, mapping the play. He can’t go for Stevie directly. He has to cross to the opposite wall first. That way, when Stevie shoots at William, the bullets will move perpendicular to the other hostages. It also means Stevie will have time to pull the trigger, perhaps multiple times, as William turns at the wall and goes toward him.

He is almost certain that the gun is a .32, and it is the perfect gun. Shoot a guy as big as William with a .22, and it’s only going to make him angry. A .38, however, could push him backward in midstride, and a good hit from a .45 would blast a huge hole in him and drop him instantly.

But a .32? William has crashed through hosts of offensive linemen, barreled into massive blockers, bulling forward to get to the ball carrier and take him down. He has waded willfully toward pain a thousand times. He knows how to overbalance, tip his body forward and dig with his feet. The gun will tear him up, but he is stronger than it. He was practically built for running into gunfire from a .32. Unless Stevie gets lucky, hits his heart or brain, William’s big body can absorb the bullets long enough for him to sprint close. There is a large glass paperweight near him on the lowest shelf of the desk. He will smash this paperweight into Stevie’s head and lay him out.

If he does it right, this girl and her little boy get to walk out hand in hand, and the old couple, too. The clerk can stop weeping and go back to work, save up some cash, and fix her teeth. Stevie can wake up in prison with a bad headache. Life will go on for all of them its inexorable way.

Meanwhile, William can stop thinking. Stop remembering. He can lie down quietly and bleed. Hopefully, Stevie will shoot him enough times to be definitive. Everyone gets what they want.

The phone rings again. It is close, sitting on the desk beside him. He looks from the phone to Stevie, who is standing in the sunlight under the windows. William can see a million dust motes floating in the yellow light.

“You gonna answer that?” William asks, meeting Stevie’s eyes. Man to man. A dare. The same look he learned to use on guys on the opposing team at the ten-yard line.

Stevie pants and his eyes roll around. “You think I’m stupid, big guy? You want me to come over by you? Lean across you, get that phone, huh?”

William shrugs. If Stevie comes close, William could take control of his gun hand and have Stevie pinned and helpless in seconds. He likes his first plan better, though, and Stevie doesn’t move toward him anyway. Stevie is stupid, and his limited synapses are misfiring because of the stimulant he ate or smoked or snorted, but he has a roach’s instinct for self-preservation.

“I could answer it,” William says. He reaches for the phone.

Stevie panics, brings the gun to bear. “Hell, no!” William hears Shandi’s breath catch as the gun swings. He stills. Stevie wastes another ring puffing a short breath in and out. “No one needs to talk to the cops but me.” He eyeballs the phone, then William, wanting one, rightfully wary of the other.

“I could slide it to you,” William says, impatient now.

While Stevie is thinking it over, the phone stops.

William says, “I’ll get it to you for next time. They will call back.”

A phone call is a distraction. It could give William a tiny opening. It’s all he needs.

Stevie stops looking for the trap in the offer and nods. William half rises and turns to the desk, on his knees now with his back to Stevie. His right hand reaches up for the phone, but his left hand reaches into the shelving and closes around the large glass paperweight. As he turns back, he keeps the paperweight behind him, setting it down easy with an almost silent
click
. Then he slides the phone across the floor. It comes to rest at Stevie’s feet. Stevie bends at the knee, watching them all as he fumbles around with his free hand, trying to find it.

Finally, he gets it and rises. It hasn’t rung in a good thirty seconds, but he clicks the button anyway. “Hello?”

William can hear the dial tone. Stevie says, “Hello?” again, louder and angrier. A red flush does a fast creep up the back of his neck and washes into his cheeks.

“It went to voice mail,” the old man says. He sounds angry and aggrieved and at the same time patronizing, explaining the obvious to someone very stupid.

Stevie stares at the phone, and then at the old man. He blows his breath out of his nostrils in a fast, loud snort. The old man will not look away. William smells ozone. Hormones—or something truthfully electric—crackle the air between them. Stevie is shocked into moving. He runs at the old man in a short, vicious charge, yelling as he moves, “Shut up! Shut up! This is your fault!”

William starts to move, too, his right hand closing on the paperweight behind him, but at the same time the clerk lets out a short, sharp scream and Shandi clutches at his arm. The little boy grabs his shirt in two panicked handfuls, yelling a long, scared vowel sound.

Stevie stops short and kicks wildly at the old man’s gut. The old guy falls sideways into the wall and folds, curling into a fetal shape. Stevie kicks his head, his shoulder, arms flailing.

William says, “Let me go,” pushing the words between his teeth and trying to peel them off him.

Stevie’s arms pinwheel in crazy circles, gun in one hand, phone in the other. The old lady screams and puts one hand on each cheek, as Stevie kicks the old man a third time.

Shandi yells, “Stop it, stop it!”

She lets go of William to put both arms around her son, pulling his face into her so he can’t see. The boy lets go to push at his mother, trying to see anyway. His cap comes off and falls against William’s leg.

Stevie is already dancing back to the wall with the row of high, slitted windows. The old man gasps and coughs, holding his kicked ribs. William puts his hand with the paperweight beside his thigh, on the floor, breathing hard, his body full of pent motion.

“Your fault,” Stevie says to the old guy, loud. The sheer physical exertion should have calmed him, but instead he seems exhilarated. He is panting, so energized his arms twitch and his voice breaks.

The old man’s wife is on her knees now, arms going around her gasping husband.

“It’s not,” she says to Stevie, and her eyes are so cold. She would kill Stevie right now if she could. Kill him and never lose a minute’s sleep. William likes her.

“Shut up, you old bitch,” Stevie says. His lips are twisting up into a feral, panting smile. “This is your fault.”

William feels Shandi’s arm tighten around her child at the ugly word.

The clerk’s head is back down. She is crying with her hands slack by her sides. She snorts and hitches, pulling Stevie’s gaze.

“I want to go home,” the clerk says, tears streaming unchecked down her face.

She has a cartoon bird tattooed on one breast. Another thing with feathers, bobbing up and down, yellow and cheerful, as her chest heaves from the weeping.

“Don’t you even,” Stevie snaps at the clerk, furious. He looks at Shandi and her big-eyed child, who has succeeded in getting his head up. He peeks out from his mother’s armpit. “It’s them, not me. Stupid rich shits.”

Stevie waves his free hand at the old couple, huddled together. The clerk keeps sobbing. Stevie turns to the couple, and spit flecks come out as he speaks. “How many of these you got, these gas stations. Like ten? How many you got?” It doesn’t sound rhetorical. He takes a stamping step toward them again, as if he might go kick an answer out of the old man. William shifts his legs, readying, his grip firm and easy on the paperweight. It is heavy and hard, larger than a softball, built for his big hand. The orange daisy is cradled facedown in his palm.

“Six.” The old lady’s nostrils flare as she speaks.

“Yeah, so, six,” Stevie says, almost a growl. “You make a crap ton of money, and you don’t even work. You got her for that, right?” He jerks his thumb at the weeping clerk. “Her and a bunch more like her. They get, what? Minimum wage? Maybe a free slushie come Christmas? You swing by to get your big piles of scratch in your Cadillac. You sit in your fat house, charging guys like me five dollars for a pack a smokes. You got everything. Guy like me, what have I got? Huh?”

“A gun,” the old woman says, not backing down. “And no heart. You worthless trash.”

The words make Stevie’s spine jerk straight. His arm swings up as he takes another stamping step toward them. His whole face is twisted now, his teeth bared in a display of dominance that the gun renders ridiculous.

The sound of the gun cocking is huge. It is a sound that eats all the ambient noise in the room. William feels the earth slow in its rotation, his perception of time elongating to a single heartbeat. He can see the spunky old lady’s hand reach for her husband. Stevie brings the gun to bear with murder written so plainly on his face that William needs no help to read it. The old man is lying down with his head in his wife’s lap, but his hand reaches for hers at the same time. He is closing his eyes. Hers stay open.

William is already moving, his big athlete’s body well ahead of his brain, his mouth saying, “Get down,” to Shandi as his body carries him away.

He is at the wall before Stevie understands what is happening. William turns and overbalances forward, digging with his feet, hurtling toward Stevie. His hand holding the paperweight is also in motion, eating the momentum, loading it all into the swing.

He is less than a third of the way there when he knows he has miscalculated. The paperweight, with all the force of his big body behind it, is moving too fast. But his body is committed, plunging forward. He cannot slow it or call it back.

Stevie has turned, but now he is wasting all this luxurious slow time by making his eyebrows rise. His mouth drops open into an expression so exaggerated it is like a page out of William’s old vegetable book. The radish is happy. The eggplant is sad. The potato is surprised.

Stevie is the potato.

The gun is pointing at the floor now. His other hand opens and the phone hovers in midair, waiting for the next endless second to pass so it can obey gravity and clatter to the floor. The gun hand starts to move now, but it is not bringing the gun to bear. It is coming up defensively, as if Stevie’s pale, fleshy forearm can stop William, halt the raging force of his charge.

William’s blow connects as the phone smashes on the floor, so that only William hears the shivery bone crunch as the paperweight meets the side of Stevie’s head. Stevie pauses, still making the same expression, and then time snaps into its regular track. Stevie thunks to the floor, faceup. Momentum from the swing spins William to the wall. He stops there. Stevie lies where he has fallen. He is still and his eyes are open, staring sightlessly up.

There is a breathless pause. The cocked gun lies ready by his slack hand.

William holds tight to the paperweight. He looks at Stevie, who has absolutely failed to shoot him. He hasn’t shot William even once.

William shakes his head, back and forth. He was so sure. It was destiny, by his own definition, a thing you choose. A thing you follow relentlessly, no matter what stands between you and it. He leans against the wall, breathing hard from the adrenaline.

The clerk has stopped crying. She has gone quiet, almost as still as Stevie.

Shandi rises to her knees, staring at Stevie, but her child’s dark-fringed eyes are fixed on William. His mouth is a solemn slash. William slides along the wall until the corner stops him. He is trying to understand the shape his own face is making.

The tomato is relieved. The lime is disappointed.

His brain feels stuck, remembering that as a child, it bothered him no end that many of what his therapist called “vegetable pictures” were actually fruits.

Outside the Circle K, someone has brought a megaphone. A huge voice says, “This is the police. Please pick up the landline. We just want to talk.”

A muffled ringing begins. Apparently, only the phone’s casing has broken. The hand piece is somewhere under Stevie.

It is the little old lady who finally moves. She lets go of her husband, who is folded in a huddle around his own ribs. She clambers quickly to her feet. William thinks she is going to dig under Stevie and get the phone and answer, tell the police they can come in now. She doesn’t. Instead she runs at Stevie in a tottery five-step sprint. She goes right to his hand and she kicks at it, his gun hand.