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The only thing that Jacob saw was the rifle. The black muzzle led the way through the door, perfect in the roundness of its flash suppressor, only echoed by the smaller, darker circle at its center.
Standing in the rainbow interior of the juice shop, its bright florescent lights turning every reflective surface into chrome, Jacob’s tall frame was elongated in the funhouse mirror of the entrance as it swung open. He wouldn’t have even glanced it that direction if he hadn’t been staring at the checkout girl. Prenessa was her name and Jacob had been timing his visits to the shop, more or less successfully, to match her schedule. On first seeing her, he had been enchanted by everything from her braids to the soft cocoa of her skin. He learned quickly, though, that she didn’t backed down from anything, whether it was that screaming middle-aged mom or the asshole with the Confederate flag tattoo. To Jacob, Prenessa was tough, smart enough to be bored with her shit job, and would occasionally grace him with a smile like the sun coming out.
As she brought listless eyes up from the register to the next customer, Jacob hoped she might see him. Instead, she glanced at the opening door next to him and her eyes widened as someone whose worst fears had been confirmed. Jacob ceased admiring her hard beauty at the almost instantaneous change.
After that, everything fell away, and there was only the gun. Jacob didn’t know much about firearms, but he knew that even in Constitutional Carry states like his, you didn’t walk around with your rifle unslung. Now here was one walking in through the mirrored front door, barrel raised, pointing into the shop’s bright and multi-colored interior.
Jacob hadn’t thought much about what he would do in what the news consistently referred to as an ‘active shooter’ situation. What thoughts he’d had mostly revolved around hoping he wouldn’t be in one. Here he was now, though, at the end of a long line of people waiting to get their juice, arranged like so many paper targets, with the tough Prenessa too far away to do anything, too petrified to even duck behind the counter. From somewhere, Jacob heard laughter.
With the door chime still echoing, Jacob reached out and grabbed the barrel behind the front sight, and yanked as hard as he could, pivoting with the weight of all of his body. He pulled the rifle into the store, dragging a scrawny and scruffy white dude with it, still attached to the gun by its sling. The man’s smaller size allowed Jacob to swing around, skittering him across the tile floor.
The rifle was better maintained than its owner, clean and well-fed, not a speck of dirt on it with a sizable magazine. Jacob grabbed its other end by the stock and launched a kick into its owner’s crotch.
The well-aimed blow crunched into the man’s testicles, doubling him over. As he collapsed with a groan, Jacob tore the rifle from him. The moment blurred and yells issued from beyond the adrenaline bubble that Jacob now inhabited.
Then there was an aspirated sound like driving out of a tunnel and Jacob seized. Something slapped into his back, hard and paralyzing like the ice ball a mean-spirited Michigan cousin had hit him with many years ago. He reached for the impact point on his back, but his fingers wouldn’t obey his commands, spasming into pained claws as his shoulders contorted, bending towards each other.
The juice shop lost whatever magic had been holding it in place and tilted, sliding away. The soft landing on the other man was what told Jacob he had fallen, rolling over so his vision was dominated by the firmament of the shop’s water-stained and cratered cardboard ceiling.
That moonscape was breached by another gun, another long rifle coming into view before the portly fellow wielding it followed. Eyes filled with a fear that mirrored Prenessa’s, he stared into Jacob’s still open eyes as he yelled, “What the hell are you doing? I told you to stop!”
The man jerked like a hunted animal that caught a scent on the wind and raised his eyes back to the crowd. He swung the rifle around as he yelled, “You saw him! That crazy nigger attacked my friend!”
Jacob’s chest felt very cold while his back felt warm and wet. He tilted his head to see the store’s patrons scattered, some hiding behind furniture, others circling to avoid the swaying rifle. “You dumb asshole,” someone screamed, “did you think the Taliban airdropped terrorists inta here?”
The second gunman shouted back, shrieking for the crowd to shut up, and leaned over to look past Jacob to his downed friend. From behind him, a smaller pair of arms appeared to wrap themselves around the man’s neck, locking under his beard to drag him out of Jacob’s narrowing field of vision. There may have been more gunshots, or maybe people banging into furniture, but he could only hear a faint and distant struggle.
It didn’t concern Jacob, though. He felt the warm love of God coursing from him, covering him and the man under him, and he wondered why his chest, pointed towards Heaven, felt so cold.
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It wasn’t visible from outside with the bright afternoon sun, but there was a light inside, a single bare bulb that hung in the center of the room. Pushed against the edges of the room’s other three walls were a motley assortment of sleeping bags and blankets. Various food containers, styrofoam coffee cups, and other trash littered much of the rest. It smelled of body odor and marijuana.
The red stripe of his balaclava was the only thing that made Max stand out from the rest of the trash as he stood up from one of the piles. He flicked a cigarette away so it collided with a wall just above the Algerian, showering him with sparks that his mid-afternoon nap allowed him to ignore. Max smiled at Lanzo, glancing at me as he came forward, opening his arms towards the other man for a hug. There was hesitation on both of their parts, a mutual muttering in a language that wasn’t quite French, and eventually an embrace.
As they did this dance, the Algerian and Fatty came to, the latter having been dozing in front of a locked door that faced the embankment and must have led deeper into the facilities. Both of them stood, not saying much, but eyeing me as I still blocked the only exit. Each of them embraced Lanzo in turn, no one’s attention wandering too far from me.
Knowing from our encounter in Simon’s that if things went sideways Fatty would be the most dangerous in the tight space of the hutch, I pointed to him. “There’s a épicerie not far from here.” I pointed up the slope as if we could all see through the walls. “We passed it on the corner. Go see if there’s a first aid kit or something.” From the pocket of the trench coat I pulled out some of the Euros Mitnick had given me, making sure it was obvious to everyone. I peeled bills off of the roll, more than he would ever need for a five-and-dime purchase. I indicated Lanzo’s feet with the cash, “He’s been hurt. I’ll need to stitch him up.”
Fatty glanced between me and the money, greed and an aversion to being ordered around warring on his face. Pretending not to understand what was happening, I added, “What? I didn’t hurt him,” and held out the money.
Perhaps seeking confirmation, he looked to Lanzo who nodded. Fatty snatched the bills from my hand and huffed out. In the same manner, Max nodded to the tall Algerian who followed Fatty out the door.
I moved closer to Max and Lanzo, making sure to catch their eyes before glancing to the other and then back again. I indicated Max and me with a finger back and forth, saying, “We fought, we talked. Now we know each other.” When Max nodded I did the same between me and Lanzo, repeating the words. I noted that Lanzo wasn’t completely committed to the plan we had made in the alley. Or was a terrible poker player. His indecision crawled across his face.
I ignored it, indicating us all in turn with the same finger. “So we’re all friends now, yeah?” Both of the young men glanced at each other, shuffled hesitantly, then nodded with increasing earnestness. I felt like a principal settling a playground brawl.
“Good. So no more bullshit,” that last statement almost always being a preamble to more bullshit. I found an old bucket in one of the trash piles and flipped it over, setting it down next to Lanzo, gesturing from him to it. “Sit down. Take the weight off your foot.” Lanzo shuffled in his doubt, then winced as he placed weight onto the wounded foot. This persuaded him more than I could. He sat on the bucket.
I found a milk crate and sat on it facing him, his back to Max. I gestured to his feet and told Lanzo, “Take off your boot. Let me take a look.” As he struggled to pull it off, I spoke to Max. “Lanzo and I have been talking.”
It was Max’s turn to shuffle, eyeing the back of his friend’s head as he did. He blinked and nodded, but I kept an eye on Lanzo.
“We talked about Mitnick and Sartre. Sartre is tired of Mitnick’s bullshit. His connerie.” I took Lanzo’s boot away from him once it was off, indicating the sock with it. “So he likes your idea of getting Nika away from him.” Even gingerly pulling the sock off caused Lanzo to wince, but the mention of her name got his attention. I grabbed the sock from him before he could throw it on the floor.
I made a show of examining the sole of Lanzo’s foot, continued talking. “She’s obviously important to Mitnick. Important enough that he’ll pay money to get her back.” I wiped some of the blood away from the wound, enough to get a better examination. It was less than an inch long, slightly diagonal, but generally going from his toes to his heel in one gash.
Even with the light bulb, the room was still dim, so I leaned closer to the wound as I spoke. “Sartre has given the OK for us to grab the girl. We’ll hold onto her for awhile, let her think we rescued her while Mitnick goes crazy searching for her. Then, eventually, Sartre steps in, negotiates a price, we send her back and we all get rich.” I stopped examining the foot to stare directly at Max. “That’s your plan, right?”
Max nodded, unwilling to say anything out loud. I couldn’t blame – it would be an admission of having lied to Lanzo, rubbishing whatever lies he had told his friend about rescuing the girl. But I wasn’t willing to let him slither away from this, urging him to speak with widening eyes. Max squirmed for a moment, then acquiesced with a, “Oui.”
At that single pronunciation Lanzo’s eyes blazed, his foot forgotten. In that moment, he could no longer deny that I had told him the truth, that his friends were willing to betray him and his girl for nothing more than short-term gain. Possibly a lot of short-term gain, but nothing more. I had warned him to be ready, to consider what he would do when he learned the truth, but I also knew that there wasn’t anything you could do to prepare yourself for that kind of emotional punch. I saw his cheeks begin to redden and his mouth begin to form very angry words.
So that’s when I stuck my thumb into the hole in his foot. I needed to determine how deep it was anyway, but I could have done it a lot more gently. I did the opposite of that, angling my thumb and its nail for maximum penetration. Instead of spitting angry accusation at his friend, Lanzo howled, gripping the side of the bucket as he nearly toppled over. I kept digging around for a few seconds anyway.
Max jumped at the animal sound, frightened as it bounced around the enclosed space. I took my thumb out, but kept ahold of Lanzo. When his cry became cursing between hard, panting breaths, I said, “Don’t be a baby. I’m just cleaning the wound.”
While Lanzo stared at his foot like it was made of hot iron, I kept Max in place with a hard stare. His surprise was quickly transforming into protective anger, and I could see it being fed by the guilt of betraying his friend. I didn’t want that to get out of hand, so I said, “It doesn’t look too bad. You probably won’t need stitches, just some sutures.” I held the sock to the wound to staunch the bleeding while we waited for Fatty.
I gave it a few minutes to let everyone settle, then went on. “There’s no way we’re getting her out of Mitnick’s. His house might as well be a military compound with all of the men he has around the villa. She has to come out to us.” I stared hard at Lanzo, “That’s where you come in.”
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Most days the man rose before dawn, moving in the dark to his small toilet to perform his morning ablutions. During this punctilious ritual, he would decide how he would tend to the grass around his home, checking for weeds and varmints, and make plans for a garden he never seemed to start.
Most days the sun was bright and he happily worked in the lawn. He only tended the cottage’s immediate vicinity, for the grass stretched out around his home in a vast sea of green, unblemished by neighbors, roads, or trees. He was uncertain as to how he had arrived at this state of affairs, for he had no recollection of arriving there. This didn’t concern him, though.
Most days this was true until the buzzing started. It would begin somewhere beyond the horizon, then rise like an unseen cloud, moving towards his home. Then he would sigh, and straighten up on creaking knees, and move back into the house. There he’d prepare tea for the strangers he knew would be arriving shortly.
Most days, the visitors were shades that would swirl about his home. They would ask questions about his well-being and his memory, but he didn’t care for their intrusions. He smiled and nodded, their questions becoming an incessant bombination that would only cause him to hope they would leave. Eventually their noise would reach a crescendo and they would finally vanish as quickly as they had arrived. The silence that followed always left behind a bubble in his ears and an empty ache in his bones.
Most days it went on like this, but some days, after washing his hands and scrubbing his face, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, a dark face going to gray, with bags under its eyes, hair receding from the temples. He would find himself transfixed by the image of a much younger man interposing itself. The young man who lived in a countryside village, raised by a loving couple, amongst friends and neighbors, who grew up exploring the woods around the town. Under the forest’s canopy of leaves, he planned a future with so many possibilities he could hardly choose between them. Until the buzzing sounded, like no other insect, with lights weaving between the patches of sky, moving as randomly as a child’s sparkler, closer and brighter until he was blinded. Then there, on the forest floor, revealed as the veil of darkness was peeled back, a small house. Like a home of a Victorian doll, it was intricate and detailed, made all the more strange by its appearance of always having been there, its base covered in the same green moss as the forest floor, its perfection only ruined by the buzzing issuing forth.
Those days, he tore his gaze from the mirror by shaking himself so strongly he might have been breaking the hold of an attacker. He turned then, in the dark, reaching for the bathroom’s doorknob, jamming his fingers into the solid wood of the door, grasping his pained fingers as a child might, staring into the dark as if the door had betrayed him. After a time, he tentatively reached out to what he knew was in front of him, a solid wooden door, with a single doorknob on the left, its hinges on the right. He placed the palm of his uninjured hand on the smooth wood of the door, above where he knew the doorknob was, and slid his hand down. On that slow descent, his hand encountered nothing but the long, vertical grain of the wood.
Forgetting the pain of his knuckles, he pawed at the door, searching where he knew the knob should be, hands straying into the dark to search areas the doorknob simply couldn’t be. As his heartbeat began to thunder, his fingers would find the door’s seam, searching along it for some space, some handhold, a place he could pry it open, only ceasing to search for the doorknob again, blindly hoping that it might somehow reappear. When neither wood nor seam of the door yielded anything, he would pull at the hinges until his fingernails were reduced to bloody splinters.
Covered in sweat and panic, he would attack the door, kicking and punching it, only bruising knuckles and cracking bones on its immutable surface. This clatter of this was only broken by the buzzing sound returning, emanating from every corner of the room until he had to stop his assault on the door to press his palms to his temples, falling to his knees. In the piercing clarity of that moment he could hear the questions.
[Identity?]
“Go away.”
[How maintain existence with knowledge of corporeal dissipation?]
“I don’t know what you’re saying.”
[Function of dissolution?]
“I don’t know!”
[With mono view of time/space manifold, selection of future choices?]
“I just want to tend the grass!”
[Measurement of accomplishments within species’ limited confines?]
“Let me go!”
[Is function of regret?]
The questions would continue, like mandibles burrowing into his brain, until a scream boiled out of him, issuing from a space so primal that it banished the mechanical arthropod buzzing and the voices that issued forth. Their sudden withdrawal pulled the bones out of his body and he would collapse on the bathroom floor, slipping into unconsciousness on the cool tiles. When he awoke, the room would be bright with daylight, the doorknob visible in its rightful place. He would grasp it, grateful when it turned in his hands, wanting to get away from the mirror and the buzzing. He didn’t have the answers to their questions.
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Lanzo blinked sweat out of his eyes, staring down the barrel of the pistol at me. “Why do you care?”
I felt my hands lower under the weight of the question. How was I to explain the strange obsessions that had led me to this place? That the men who ruled over Lanzo and Nika’s tiny lives weren’t any different than the other monsters I had seen walking the earth? That maybe they deserved something more than to be bargaining chips between men who would never have enough to satisfy them? That if I shook this town hard enough, maybe it’d blow like a bottle of nitroglycerin?
Instead of trying to explain any of that I replied, “I know what it’s like to be in love.” Twice, in fact, which made me half as lucky as most.
Lanzo shifted his weight in a way that made me worry he was going to buckle, but he only lowered the pistol a bit and wondered at me. After a few moments he asked an exploratory, “What would you have us do?”
Hands still up, I held them forward in entreatment. “Let’s go talk to them. Your boys, Max and the rest. They already approached me about Nika, so you’ll see they know me. You and me, we pretend that we’ve already talked about the ransom and you’re OK with it.” I pointed at Lanzo, “You’ll hear from them what they planned all along.”
“And when we learn you are wrong?”
“Then I fix up your foot and I go the fuck home.” Lanzo had let the pistol drift entirely away from me, so I risked, “But you’ve got to ask yourself what you’re going to do when you learn I’m right?”
Lanzo’s expression froze into the angry glare, making me wonder if he had his own suspicions about his friends all along.
He gestured down the alley with the pistol, indicating the direction he had been going. “You go first.”
“Sure,” I nodded. I headed that way, not looking back. I listened to Lanzo limp along, though, trying to keep an ear open for the sound of a pistol being cocked, not entirely certain he wouldn’t change his mind about shooting me.
It was a short distance to where the alley let out, opening up onto a perpendicular cobblestone street. I stopped, hearing Lanzo continue to walk for a few steps beyond that, a sure sign that the pain of his foot was distracting him. I rotated slightly, so Lanzo could see both my face and the street ahead. I pointed to the pistol that he still held in his hand. “You’re not going to keep that out the entire time are you?” I flew my finger back and forth, indicating the weapon and the public thoroughfare.
I was glad to see that Lanzo wasn’t leaving an overtly bloody trail of footprints behind, but he still seemed paler than before. His dogged expression broke with relief at seeing the cobblestones of the road. He didn’t smile, but slipped the revolver into his jacket, tucking it into the back of his waistband.
Next, my eyes dropped to his still bare feet. I stared down at his foot long enough to make sure he saw it, then asked, “You sure we don’t need a cab or something?”
He shook his head. “It is not far.”
I knew that at our current, wounded pace it would take a very long time to get anywhere. With than in mind, I sat down on a nearby stoop and took off one of my own shoes. Lanzo darted his eyes between the street and the alley, uncertain of what I was doing and uncomfortable with my odd behavior. I ignored him and removed a sock and held it out to him. “Staunch the bleeding,” I waved it at his foot, “then put on your boots.”
He glared at the sock as if, finally, my dastardly plan was coming to fruition. Feeling tired as the adrenaline of nearly being shot drained away, I just waved the fabric at him some more and added, “It’s that or I carry you.”
Lanzo snorted, but snatched the sock, then sat down on the stoop several feet away from me. I stood and used my width to block the view of anyone who might be curious about what this unlikely pair was doing out on a beautiful Mediterranean day. While we weren’t doing anything illegal, I preferred not to have anyone notice the blood or give any reason to remember us.
Lanzo wrapped the fabric around his foot, then put on his boots. I nodded encouragingly and stepped out of the alley. The stones of the road had been laid long before the fast cars that sometimes used them were made so, like a good boy scout, I glanced up and down the street.
Satisfied there wasn’t anything, vehicular or otherwise, that might be a surprise, I stepped out and I waited for Lanzo. Keeping as much distance as the narrow road allowed, he hopped up next to me and performed the same perfunctory scanning of our environment.
Confident that I hadn’t laid out some elaborate ambush for him, he indicated a direction with a hand that I was relieved didn’t have the revolver in it. He was still limping, but we made better time than we were before. Eventually, we walked down the street side-by-side as if we weren’t strangers.
I was glad to see we weren’t headed back in the direction of Grenoble Station, but I wasn’t sure of anything beyond that. We were definitely headed towards the river and away from whatever vestiges of civilization that the fringe neighborhood contained. I kept moving, slowing my pace to match Lanzo’s, but never asking about our destination.
When the river came in sight I judged we must be south of the The Factory, closer to the ocean. Between us and the gorge was the same north-south road that Sartre had parked on to show me where Sergei was and the road I had driven down after leaving the burning Russian behind.
Walking over to the bollard and chain border I could see we were high enough that the sidewalk offered a view of the river placidly letting out into the blue Mediterranean sea far below, the stones of the embankment the only gray in the warm sun. The rest was covered in the green spring vegetation and the wind carried the scent of honeysuckle and eucalyptus.
Despite his wounded foot, Lanzo went over the chain one leg after another with the ease of habit. I found my curiosity overrode my good sense and I followed. Here, there was a narrow, smooth path leveled into the embankment and it led down in long switchbacks. Fortunately, the warm afternoon sun had dried the stones, so the chances of slipping were less, but I still moved along in careful steps, not wanting to take the long slide down to the river.
The trickiest part was moving past the storm drains; nearly big enough to let a man walk in without hunching, their cement lips projected out of the embankment like massive cannons. Each led into the darkness under the city and, as we passed, I couldn’t help but seeing the specter of Sergei linger in those shadows. I just gripped the hard rim like it was a ladder rung and swung past, trying to ignore his secrets. With the smell of street trash and human waste washing out of each tunnel, I was oddly grateful that Lanzo had put his boots back on. Every drain was probably a wonderful source for infection.
We didn’t pass too many of those barriers before I spotted a small gray hutch that jutted out from the slope, the same gray as the stones of the embankment. It hung onto the cliff like a venerable lighthouse keeper, alone and happy to be ignored. It was flat-topped, with no windows, a piece of utility construction that was probably a part of the original flood controls. A door faced out onto the path, rusted red with age, nothing more than a broken padlock hanging off its staple. This far down, I doubt the building was visible from the road even if you knew to look for it.
Lanzo hopped towards the door and popped off the lock, didn’t bother with the secret knock I half expected. He swerved his head, indicating for me to follow. I hesitated, but decided to show the same faith in him that he was showing in me and followed.
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If it weren’t for our dogs, Al and I would have remained perfect strangers. In the town we lived in, though, there wasn’t ever a lot of space between the haves and the have-nots, so my one-story ranch house was only a short walk away from his stately Georgian home. Only a small grassy, unkempt hill partitioned the road that ran through my neighborhood from the street that winded through his.
Like the thousands of footprints that beat the wild grass of that embankment into submission, I often walked my dog Clementine down the hill to wander the other neighborhood. Its wider roads and sidewalks were easier to enjoy if you were nervous about walking a jumpy dog near traffic, and it was lined with elms taller that its most ostentatious house, providing shelter from the sun or the rain. There was even a creek to mark the neighborhood’s lowest end, a foil to the hill at the top.
Other than the occasional dog walk, I never went into Al’s neighborhood, one of those places named after whatever animal was displaced in the construction of it; Fox Hill or Turkey Glen, Deer Spring, or whatever. So the only time I saw him leave his home was to walk his terrier mix, Sabrina. Even then, I rarely did more than wave, for every time we crossed paths I thought I detected a nearly imperceptible stink-eye from behind his giant, old-man sunglasses. This made me feel like even more of a stranger in a neighborhood that wasn’t my own, so I just smiled and waved and moved on. Al, leash in hand, waved back. He didn’t smile.
That was until one day, Sabrina got away from him. I was standing at the mid-point of the aforementioned hill when Sabrina came barreling towards me and Clementine. Already forced by advancing age to use a cane, Al had no chance of keeping up, but I could see him trying his best to catch Sabrina.
Clementine, as her name suggests, was a small orange thing, and Sabrina was on the small side as well, but heading towards us like a mottled missile, sleek with her nose pointed straight at us. I’m not sure what made me put my fear aside, but I stepped between Clementine and the incoming marauder, as much determined to catch Al’s dog as protect my own.
In retrospect, this may not have been the smartest move, given that I had no idea what Sabrina’s capacity for savagery might be. But I’ve often been accused of acting or speaking before thinking and I did that then. Fortunately for everyone involved, Sabrina stopped short, barking ferociously, pushing Clementine into a shivering retreat.
Once I established that the hand I threw up as a stop sign for Sabrina wasn’t missing any fingers, I saw Al hobbling up the street. I gingerly reached out and took ahold of Sabrina’s leash. By the time Al caught up, I had both dogs in hand and they were sniffing each other in a curious, if cautious, manner.
Al, smile grim with embarrassed fashion, thanked me. I realized then it wasn’t simply instinct that caused me to stop Sabrina. Besides the cane and the protective shell of his hat and wide sunglasses, there was a slight stoop to Al’s shoulder. He was a tall man, a good half-foot taller than me, but gravity and time were making him smaller and I suppose I noticed that from the times we passed each other.
Standing at the foot of the hill, we introduced ourselves. “You live up in that neighborhood?” Al asked.
“I do. Right over there.” I indicating the white ranch house visible from where we stood.
Al ‘s forced smile became a grimace. “I used to be able to make it up that hill.”
Looking at the rougher terrain of the grassy knoll, I wondered if that’s what gave him trouble. “Yeah. I wonder why the city hasn’t paved over this and joined the streets.”
Al’s smile returned, but genuine for the first time. “Oh, they haven’t done that because I won’t let them.”
“I’m sorry?”
Al’s pride straightened him as much as it could. “I own that parcel. I won’t sell it to the city, so they can’t develop it. I don’t want a road coming through there.”
I looked at the hill and its 30 short yards that separated one neighborhood from another, and considered all of my neighbors who did odd jobs for people in Al’s neighborhood. “Why not?”
Even from the under the brim of his hat, Al’s smile beamed as he began to speak, but then thought better of it. “Too much traffic,” was the answer he went with.
It seemed to me that my neighbors having to drive all the way around both neighborhoods to get to the entrance at the bottom of Al’s would cause more traffic then driving straight through, so I said, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well,” Al smiled, “I suppose I prefer if everyone comes in the same way.”
“Don’t want people sneaking in the back?” I almost asked, but caught my tongue. Instead, I decided to let that momentum lead me to exit the conversation. I gestured at Sabrina, now by his side, and said, “Well, glad I could help with that.”
Al lifted his cane. “Oh, this? I’ve got it for my spondylitis.”
The confusion the technical word introduced into the conversation stopped me. “I’m sorry?”
Without hesitation, Al launched into an explanation, going into detail about how spondylitis was a degenerative nerve disease that he had been diagnosed with a few years ago. It bent his back and forced him to use a cane. He spoke of the malady as if it were an enemy, one that he hated but couldn’t touch, like a taskmaster with a long whip. He spoke of useless doctors for which he held an equal fury, men and women who could do nothing to ease his pain or reverse the degrading quality of his life.
It was, indeed, a very sad story and I listened patiently to it. For about the first 10 minutes. I nodded and asked questions at what felt like appropriate intervals, expressing sympathy with slow nods and soft utterances. After a time, though, I felt taken hostage by my pity for him, unable to escape, but desperate to cross the short stretch of grass that he couldn’t follow me over.
Eventually, he said, “Yes, I was once a strong, young man like you.” I think he meant it as a joke, but the sentence was conclusive enough that I spoke so shortly after it was almost interrupting. “Well, I gotta get back to it,” I replied, wanting to leave while I was still young.
Unfortunately for me, Clementine and Sabrina became friendly during Al’s long diatribe, getting to know each other in a prolonged series of increasingly intimate sniffs. This made it nearly impossible to avoid Al on future walks around his neighborhood. Both dogs would become excited when the other was spotted, wagging tails and pulling on leashes, and as my wife is fond of pointing out, I can rarely deny Clementine much. So I would inevitably let her lead me to Sabrina who was attached to Al and his never-ending complaints.
The conversations always followed the same mold as the first one. There was a greeting, then at some point I would make some inadvisable comment that Al could take as an inquiry to his well-being and he would launch into a long list of corporeal complaints. These were the worst as it felt rude to walk away while he was venting about the sad state of his health.
Somehow, though, as if his loss of physical dexterity had transferred into some kind of conversational jujitsu, Al would transform his malady complaints into venting about things in general. Having mentally wandered away, I would come back to Al expounding on his view of the world at large. This tended to coincided with the opinion he held of his doctors, a quiet anger at the perceived incompetence, laziness, or entitlement, of “them.”
I artfully chose not to ask Al to define who “they” were, instead using it as a reason to leave, which was was much simpler than mustering the callousness it required to walk away from the fusing of his spine. On our future meetings, though, he continued to smash these topics together, railing against people waiting for hand-outs, or “unwilling to wait there turn,” and then launch into a long list of his maladies, expecting nothing but sympathy.
Eventually, one day, this level of cognitive dissonance produced a chuckle from me, a perverse impulse I tried to hide but couldn’t resist. It stopped Al mid-sentence, who stared at me with his wide sun glasses rimmed with the wrinkles of his anger. “What?”
I stepped back in the face of his ire, but something stronger stopped me as surely as if I had backed into a wall. Instead of making some polite excuse I answered honestly, “Sorry, everything we’re talking about just reminded me of a sermon.” I hadn’t been to church in years, but I found myself surprised that it was true.
Al gestured with Sabrina’s leash as if I were at the end of it. “Well? Let’s hear it.”
I hesitated, caught between the time it would take to tell the sermon and my desire to escape. Since Al had made me listen to his long list of complaints I went with it. “There was a woman who was down on her luck – she was poor, her mother was infirmed, her children were sick and her no-good husband had run off.” Al propped himself up on his cane, straightening himself at this beginning.
“So one night before bed she got down on her knees and prayed, ‘Jesus, please take this cross from me. I can’t bear it anymore.’ And when she went to sleep, she dreamt and Jesus came to her in that dream. The Lord said to her, ‘My child, I will take your cross from you. But if I do you have to chose a new one. Everyone has to have one. That’s part of the deal.’
“The woman understood and Jesus led her to a giant room in which the walls were hung with crosses off all different shapes and sizes. Some them were made of wood, some of stone, others had spikes and splinters, some were large and others were small. The woman was amazed at how many there were, so she spent a long time going from one to the next, trying to determine which cross she would take.”
“Eventually, the woman found one that she thought would be good, a simple wooden cross that wasn’t too big or too small, one she thought she could manage. So she took it and turned to the Lord and said, ‘Jesus, this is the cross for me.’
“And the Lord started to laugh. And he kept laughing. This confused the woman greatly, until she stopped him, saying, ‘Lord, you’re starting to hurt my feelings. What are you laughing at?’
“Wiping tears from his eyes, the Lord replied, “I’m sorry, my child. I don’t mean to laugh at you.” I paused, looking at a rapt Al for effect. “It’s just, that’s the cross you came in with.”
I let that conclusion land and watched Al, not sure how he would take it. He opened his mouth and for a moment I was sure I was going to get a broadside. I was genuinely surprised when laughter came out instead.
Al had been so sour for so long that I honestly didn’t think he was capable of laughter. My astonishment turned into my own laughter and for a few moments the two of us were just two men standing in the middle of the road, laughing like old friends. The dogs even stopped sniffing each other to fix us with curious eyes.
When we had caught our breath, Al said, “That’s a fine story.” He grinned, his hard surface stripped away to a humility I didn’t know was underneath. He swept Sabrina’s leash back and forth pondering its oscillations. After a moment, he ended the conversation with a perfunctory, “Well, we should get going.” For a man who had been laughing heartily a few moments ago, whatever he had on his mind caused him to stoop more than usual.
I nodded and we went our separate ways. Over the next few weeks I noticed Al speaking to more and more people, and none of them had the crushed expression of someone as trapped as I had felt by the vice of his complaints. Later, another neighbor asked me, “What did you say to Al?” I shrugged and said nothing of consequence. I have to admit, though, I was pretty proud of myself for being so clever.
My next exchanges with Al were friendlier. One day, while Clementine and Sabrina began their own ritual greetings, we idle chattered about the weather for a bit. It was getting on to summer and heating up. Then he surprised me with, “I’d like you to come to my church this Sunday and bring that parable you told me.”
I was flummoxed by this statement (it didn’t feel like a request) and I responded by saying that I wasn’t a preacher. “Oh, I know,” he smiled under his impenetrable sunglasses. “But I spoke to my reverend and told him you had something worth sharing.” I demurred, protested, equivocated, and begged off, but Al was as dogged about it as he had previously been about his health issues.
So that’s how one Sunday I found myself at the Three Oaks Methodist church, searching the lot for an open parking space amongst all of the congregation’s automobiles, lined up as squarely and shining as a German regiment waiting for inspection. I hurried inside, through a short introduction to the Reverend Jacobs, then to wait in the wings while he introduced me to his congregation as a “special guest speaker.”
An echoing silence filled the nave as I moved quickly to the pulpit. The church was a fine place, with arched ceilings and stain-glass windows, big enough that its pews seated enough people that I couldn’t find Al at first. This shook the small panic already growing in me, my presence feeling tethered to his own. I searched among men in suits, seated with their families dressed in their Sunday best, each a carefully coiffed and placed unit, waiting expectantly. Among the faces I found some with shimmering, expectant eyes, others with a radiating skepticism. More than a few of the parent’s checked their watches while their children snuck glances at their phones.
Someone coughed, reverberating throughout the hall, the noise opening a silent hole that sucked in all of the room’s expectations and nearly took me with it. I was only rescued from the crushing gravity of that by spotting Al. He was surrounded by somber people with speculative eyes, occasionally shooting Al glances as my silence dragged on. They bunched around him, waiting on this new, strange thing he had brought to their church.
I had some notes crumpled in my hand, sweat-stained now from my palms, and I tried to smooth them out on the podium. The crinkling of the paper was the first thing caught by the microphone and it reverberated out into the church, the letters that I had put onto the page now as indecipherable as braille.
I looked up from my own impenetrable scribble, out at the faces of the congregation, and realized I had no idea what to say to them.
