There are some things that happen to you that thicken the air around you until it is as heavy and as hard to penetrate as stone.
I don’t know a better way to explain it. It’s as if air and gravity are coconspirators, pulling you down. I tried to move fast, and I suppose I was moving fast, but I felt like Brer Rabbit caught up in the tar baby. The more I struggled, the worser I got.
My feet didn’t know how to work, and my head wasn’t thinking clearly; my brain was echoing with the sound of gunfire.
When I got to him, he was breathing. But he was bloody, and he was bad. His stupid hat was lying nearby. There was a stream of blood flowing away from Leonard’s body and it was about to touch the hat. I took the hat and put it in my coat pocket.
I said, “Leonard,” but he didn’t so much as blink.
I touched the pulse in his throat. He was going fast.
I stood up to see a half-dozen people standing around me. And the crowd was growing.
A lady said, “I called nine-one-one.”
“I hope you hit the sonofbitch,” someone in the crowd said.
After that, it seemed as if I was down on my knees forever, holding Leonard’s head across my knees. Then there were sirens, and lights, an ambulance and cops.
They took my gun and put me in a cop car and I sat there not able to speak, watching through the window as the ambulance with my best friend-my brother-drove away.
They let me make a call. I called Marvin. They asked me some questions. I did my best to answer them. There wasn’t a lot to say. The cops knew me. They knew Leonard. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. And they knew Marvin.
I went downtown, and my memory of that trip is all a haze. Finally they let me go away with Marvin. I had heard only one thing, a cop saying it to another cop, out in the hallway. It was about Leonard. He wasn’t expected to live.
He should have had chili without crackers, I thought. Goddamn it, Leonard. If you don’t die before I get to the hospital, I’m gonna kill you. Crackers and vanilla wafers. That got you shot? Maybe killed? You sonofabitch.
Don’t die, goddamn it, don’t die.
Shot outside Wal-Mart. How ignoble was that? A man who had fought in a war, and had fought dozens of tough customers over the years, gunned down in a parking lot.
“Who do you think?” Marvin said.
“Jimson. He was mad at us from the time before. And we just saw him again.”
“And you were not endearing.”
“No. It was the usual.”
“Who else is on the list?” Marvin asked.
“Vanilla Ride, maybe. Devil Red. I don’t know. We pulled someone’s chain a little too hard this time, and someone didn’t like it, or hired someone to not like it for them. They must have been scoping us out at the house. Saw Leonard alone, thought they’d take him. Come back for me. Normally, that wouldn’t be an easy thing. But this time, it was.”
“There’s no rhyme or reason to that sort of thing,” Marvin said.
“They caught us apart. We’re not easy apart, but together, we’re really difficult. Except this time.”
“Even monkeys fall out of trees,” Marvin said. “It’s not always about how good you are.”
“Take me by the house before the hospital. I want to get something.”
…
Marvin parked down the street and let me out, and then he drove by, to see what he could see. I walked across two backyards and went to my back door. No one was waiting on me. I used the key and went inside.
Upstairs, I got Brett’s little revolver and put it in my coat pocket. Simple gun. Light enough. No jams.
Downstairs, I looked out the back window. I could see our neighbor’s fence, and nothing else.
I went to the living room, peeled the curtain on first one window, then another. The yard was empty, except for dead grass nipped over with ice.
I put my hand in my pocket and went outside and looked around. I didn’t see a sniper’s nest or black helicopters or Bigfoot.
Marvin coasted up front. I got in and we went away.
It had turned very icy by now, and we almost went off in a ditch once. But we made it.
As I walked into the hospital, shaken to my core, the last thing I told myself was it no longer mattered what had been going on inside of me as of late, because I was past that now.
It didn’t matter.
It was behind me.
Whoever did this to Leonard was going to die.