I.
Gadsen’s tunneling up the aisle towards the bright white light of the grocery store’s refrigerated back wall. Logos reflect off his athletic sunglasses, the kind he uses at the shooting range and trolling the state reservoir on his late father’s Zodiac. The polarized lenses gather up the aisle’s imagery into the mandala of the day - variegated arrangements of cereal, detergents represented by a cartoon koala, an endcap towering in flushes of sky-blue, bruised-maroon, and crystalline-emerald. His disgust towards these duplicating colors is visible. He scans the wall’s frozen food section for the familiarity of marbled meats and whole milk under monochrome lights. With his back turned, the A.C. kicks on with a heave. Its invisible drone passes into nothingness and hangs over the scene. He does an about-face with an armful of rations, and again, his eyes resemble opals, darkly.
He walks out into the sun with his head turned to something at his side and strides forward with an inmate’s charm. There’s a hunger to his lean face, a sense of malnourishment lining muscles beneath a tight T and the shoulders of a pitcher. You can see it in the proud handling of a cut of tenderloin. The suspicions thrown across the busy parking lot.
...You get closer now, pulling up alongside his moving vehicle. You notice his pick-up and the bumper stickers that tell a story. The involuntary twist of his neck activates when he notices you. The gyration betrays confidence, but he looks on and you look away. Immediately, your gestures are tantamount to error. He seems without choice because his operations are engulfed in freedom. But you notice your face reddening, throat drying up. You privately reject his ultimatum but his belligerent stare sidles in and out of consciousness for the better part of an afternoon. The idea of volition is vulnerable to ridicule.
On your best day, you try and imagine who he is. A man pursuing a rusted idea of substance, lunging his spade deep in thorny earth after something he can know and hold. What he finds is unrecognizable in the light and he defines it not by what he sees but the effort thrown into its discovery. A surface pock-marked by expectation and the ache of a strained back encroach on the color and shape. It possesses a new life, one disfigured by a ghost of hope. The hunger pangs for its true name float past his mind and shadow the entire excavation - squiggly floaters your eyes perceive only without too much light or too much darkness. He holds it in the air with dirty fingers and a streak of silver on its belly blinds his eyes and pours into a mouth held agape.
II.
Here - at the intersection - even a momentary stoplight is an affront to what could be. He is offended by these allusions to his inability. He is disturbed by the information that there are places he is not to go, cannot go. The box stores line the road and the radio show invites listeners to become speakers. A caller opines from the Gulf Coast while Gadsen waits on the line. He imagines that the shadows of the streetlights are brick walls he hurdles himself into, his mass and force so great they become virtually nonexistent. A tedious patter of force that bores him, the rhythm of a faucet demolished by inertia at terminal velocity. Bam. Bam. Bam. The regulations, the lines, the impending sense of being penned in. That’s the war. They’ll attach our belly buttons to machines and drain our souls with algorithms. A bonafide guarantee that nobody can put up a fight. The next war’ll be World War IV. A war against inaction.
When he gets home the skin of the deflated lawn Santa rests under an ineffective sun as the thermometer’s red arrow points at room temp. He’s distracted in the rigmarole of entrance, and when he enters, he is met by the image of a teenager turning from a framed photo of a woman on a shelf of sports memorabilia. The boy pushes off the wall and vaults an overturned bookshelf for the back porch. Gadsen involuntarily lifts a baseball tattooed in cursive in the foyer and connects it with the back of his shaved head. A reverberating crack links their ears. The teen falls soundly to the kitchen floor and Gadsen rushes over to wretch his arms behind his back, noticing the black graffiti on the walls and TV that fight for supreme insult: RACIST. FAGGOT. COP.
Gadsen flips the kid onto his chest and he can see the white corners of the boy’s eyes looking back at him, Gadsen asking, “Where in the fuck is Whispers? Where in the fuck’s my cat?” again and again. The boy cries and Gadsen slams his chest into the springy hardwood with each prounced noun and “fuck.” The back gate slams shut and boys yell. The kid’s muscles go ragdoll when Gadsen drops him to the floor. Light streams into the once dark room when he shoves the sliding-door blinds to see three or four kids skirt the corner of the fence and into the alley. He swears they’re all black. He runs across the lawn and stops mid-stride when he remembers the age-old adage about having one in the hand and two in the bush.
When Gadsen re-enters, he swaggers with his arms folded, like in the movies, criss-crossing the living room with his shovel-shaped forehead pointed skywards. “You think I”m a faggot huh?” FUCK. NAZI. “You think I’m some kind of nazi? A cop? I might look too young for it but I’m retired in case you didn’t know. But that doesn’t matter for you. I’m the victim. You’re the criminal. Nothing you can say or do is gonna change that now. Proof’s in the pudding.” He starts towards his La-Z-Boy but the adrenaline feeds off nothing less than total dominance. The sliding glass window casts a shadow over the boy’s arms cradling the back of his swelling head. Suddenly, he starts shaking, convulsing, goes still. With a baseball bat holstered at his side he searches the house for the weak meows of Whispers. If she’s silent, it would be nearly impossible to see her in the shadows of a closet or the shade of a dresser. His senses rove for the sound of a squeak or the colorful glow of a blue or green eye in the jet black. “It’s unlike Whispers to cower,” he says to an empty room.
The kid is sapped of any agency beyond basic reptilian functions, but Gadsen puts multiple zip ties around his ankles and wrists, pinioning him like an animal. Next, he lays a tarp on the floor and rolls him onto it, then pulls it until the kid’s body is prone between recliner and TV. The light moves across his body, from feet to head, leaving in its wake a darkness, first on his legs, then his back, his nape. He doesn’t look like most black kids. A little lighter, a little hispanic maybe. Not that it mattered.
He patrols the perimeter of the yard, then seats himself before the Kid. The tarp stretches the face taut and a rivulet of drool dribbles along peach fuzz. The Kid doesn’t have a driver’s license or I.D., just a crisp five-dollar bill and an unopened condom faded with age. He checks his pulse and pours himself a glass of milk. Eventually he wakes up.
Gadsen watches National Geographic as if the RACIST sprayed on its surface is directed at the pride of lions devouring a zebra instead of himself. He turns off the set and waits for the kid to pull his head off the tarp, sticky with saliva. When they make eye contact, Gadsen points to a chair placed in front of the TV. “I’m gonna put you in that chair, got it? You’re on that tarp cause I didn’t want you pissing on my carpet.” Gadsen feels the mound on the back of his head full of blood.
When Gadsen looks across at the Kid, all he sees is fear. Gazelle fear. The weapon of the weak. The looks of pain try to penetrate more of the goodwill he’s already given. He feels the room slip into cliché - the clock ticks, an occasional car passes, airplanes. He waits, not to ratchet up the dread for the would-be burglar, but to do the Kid a service, to give him the opportunity to speak. Nothing passes their lips until Gadsen finally asks, “Why did you do this? That’s my only question. If you can answer this, I’ll let you go. That’s all I really want from you. Tell me.”
The boy glances up at him and back down with the lazy rhythm of a fan. When he tilts down the third time, he remains fixated on his body’s outline on the carpet like the chalk marks of a limbless casualty.
“The sooner you tell me where my cat is, the sooner I can let you get out of here and let you go home to your family. Have a nice home-cooked meal, listen to your rap music, hang out with your scumbag friends. You just need to talk to me. Yo! Are you listening? I don’t need to tell you how important that cat is to me. You don’t need to know how - ” The emptiness of the room distracts him, great enough that he speaks to fill it up. “ - that I love her more than any person. That cat isn’t mine all right. I need to take care of it because it doesn’t belong to me. It means something else to me, you understand? If you think that’s strange, or wrong or fucked up it’s not for you to judge. Think what you want about me, that’s your choice, but it’s also my choice to do something about it. At least I don’t break into people’s homes accusing them of crimes. At least I don’t hurt animals for fun. That’s a crime.” He wants to light a cigarette, even though he hasn’t smoked a cigarette since college. It’s these clichés seeping in. “So I’m gonna ask one more time. And I want you to talk to me, not out of kindness or fear but out of truth: why did you do this? What did I do to deserve this?”
It’s small at first, about the size of a pencil’s eraser, then quarter-size. It slowly builds into the size of a golf-ball before the spit bubble pops. A particle of moisture globs onto Gadsen’s lip.
III.
It’s after sunset now. He stands in front of the Kid as the gloaming arrives. The present has distracted him from the great shadow that casts the room into a deepening brown. Like a frog boiled in a pot of water, visibility has become an idea more than an actuality. “I’m going to be back very soon. You won’t be able to get out of those zip ties so don’t even try. In fact -”
It’s musty in the garage. The smell of venison hangs on the power tools affixed to the walls and the dusty baseball equipment in a corner. He opens the nickel-plated cabinet in his garage and his face appears in the mirror on the door’s interior. He examines himself for a moment then looks for his nylon ropes. But he forgets that outside the ropes are supporting the hoary branch of an alder hanging beyond the edge of his property, just above his neighbor’s fence. Instead, he finds a bright, orange fifty-foot cord connected to a floodlight he used to use for illuminating the baseball diamond when the timed lights weren’t synched up with the darkness. At the park outside of his school, the lights didn’t turn on until well after dusk. So this old floodlight filled that dark until the lights sputtered on well after sundown, pitching until he got so hungry he couldn’t focus on his target. He doesn’t even know if the light still works. Not that it mattered.
He ties the cable around the boy and chair until he changes color. He yanks it so tight and complete he looks like the victim of some alien tendril come down from space. Gadsen goes to the closet for his jacket and mouths into the winter coats: “I’ve tried making this easy for you kid. I just want to see you take some goddamn responsibility for this mess you’ve gotten yourself into. I can’t do to you what needs to be done. That’s for someone else to decide. I won’t choose for you, but I’ll make sure what’s done is in the right hands.” Gadsen leaves the house, locks the door, and walks down a well-lit street.
As soon as he enters the night, the image of Price rushes to the foreground of his mind. It must be like the euphoria that heroin-users describe. Price’s place is a five-minute drive but Gadsen walks it instead. The air is refreshing and the tinkle of wind chimes flit in the air. Lights from porches, garages, and lampposts on either side of the street duplicate his negative in shades of gray with Gadsen always closing in on the solid black of his shadow after each street light. With each step, the concentrated umbra that suddenly appears magnifies until the succeeding streetlight softens that shadow into nothingness and a new darkness trails behind in systematic unity. He revels in the size of his shadow and seems to rush towards the overhanging light so that he can see himself swell beyond his actual dimensions. As he expands his controlled shadow at will, the pale, asymmetric shades fan out from his central shadow. The sensor-activated lights above garage doors and porch lights indicate presence, deter thieves, and split him into shadow play. The black of lightlessness fills his focus. The geometry of equidistant illumination patterns antiphonal harmony that necessitates a 360-degree perspective he is confidently incapable of attempting.
When Beth answers the door, he’s invited in to see Price watching a History Channel program on the construction of the Hoover Dam. “Did you know,” he shouts over the blaring TV, “that slot machines are designed to give enough near-wins to keep a player invested. Apparently a gambling addict’s brain can’t tell the difference between a near-win and a win. A near-win for an addict is the same thing as the real McCoy. Funny thing that.”
“You learn that from a program on the Hoover Dam?”
“A book Beth got me. She’s trying to help me understand our daughter’s destructive behaviors. This dam they got here is a modern marvel though. But bastards won’t let you drive on it anymore cause of the terrorists. Before my first tour, I took the family out there but they wouldn’t let us drive over it. First time since the Great Depression they won’t let even American veterans drive over their own creations. Can you believe it? Those days are long-gone my friend.”
“A goddamn shame. Sour days these times.” The two men reassure themselves with nods. “I got a favor to ask you Price. I know you got no qualms for these sorts of things, but I need your help with something urgent.” He leans in, “We might need to talk mano a mano.”
“Maggie! You mind giving the fellas a minute in privacy.” She disappears into the kitchen. “Go on.”
Gadsen runs his fingers through his hair then picks at a seam on his jeans before finding the courage to speak to the hardwood floor. “Look, I know you’ve been good for me here in civilian life. Hell. Great. Helped me find a reason to live when things felt so fucked I wasn’t sure if I could walk across a parking lot to fill my prescription. I know you know that. You got me out of a psychological rut I never thought I’d find myself in and I’m a better man for it.” He stops for a moment and looks wide-eyed at the grained flooring. “And I know things are different now. You aren’t my boss anymore and I’m not a cop anymore so I can’t run to you for advice willy-nilly. You just can’t make things go away like you did when you had a hundred men under you. You’ve earned your peace and I understand that. But consider this one last favor I’m askin’ of you, something to bring you out of retirement just one last time. This fucking kid broke into my house and Whispers is missing -”
“Someone broke into your house?”
“He’s still there you see. I didn’t want to hurt ‘em, but Whispers is missing and I know he knows the kids who took her. They graffitied the inside of my house calling me every insult under the sun. Three other kids ran off when I came home and it’s this one kid who’s tied to a fucking chair, right, fucking, now, who I have. When I saw him in my house I lost it and I might have really fucked him up. Maybe it was Whispers that really threw me over the edge. Everything that cat represents to me. It’s all I have left from before. I just went ballistic. And then it was too late. He’s tied to a chair and breathing, but I hit him pretty bad with a baseball when I first saw him. Pitcher’s instinct or something. I would’ve called the department but you know how it is after me giving them a bad name. I might be the one that ends up behind my bars. I might go to jail! Can you even believe that?”
“Woah, woah, woah compadre. Take it easy, take it easy. Let’s approach this one step at a time. It’s self-defense so you can do whatever the hell you’d like. But yeah, you’ve got a point. If the media catches wind of this they might eat you alive on TV. It could blow over like it did back when we had carte blanche. But there is that stinking suspicion that every bleeding heart’ll blow this out of proportion thinking this thug were their own son or brother.” Price stares up into the light fixture between the two of them. His fingers angle upward with all eight of their tips touching as he thinks, rocking back and forth. Then he stops their oscillating dance and slides them into the spaces between, forming a web locked tightly enough so that no light escapes through his thick digits. “What we have here is a man who broke into your home-”
“He’s just a kid.”
“- a man old enough to know what it is he’s doing. Breaking into your home, disrespecting the integrity of your possessions, having you fear for your life so he can get some kicks out of making your life a living hell? For what? For fun? Gadsen, some people are animals. They have no respect for order. They have no respect for what others have. They have no respect for true freedom. They think freedom means you can do whatever you want. And it’s people like this who’ve thrown our nation - our lifeblood - into pandemonium.” Price turns off the noise of the television and the room reorients itself. “When I woke up this morning, I heard something on the way to work I can’t stop thinking about. It’s not the first time I heard it. Call it the straw that broke the camel’s back. Some - fucking lady - calls the show and says we owe it to the world to let immigrants in, that we owe it to the poor to stop taxing them. She goes on and on - I don’t even know why they let her on the show - on and on about how history’s gonna be on her side and how people like you and me are gonna have to take a long look in the mirror and think about what we’ve done to blacks, to immigrants, to the fags, to women and understand how this is our fault. But I didn’t have kids loose their fucking legs in some godforsaken desert for a brain-dead know-nothing tell me any of that’s our fault. I didn’t have Robbins, God bless his soul, get shot in the fucking face for what should have been a speeding ticket and then have a bored do-gooder preach to me!” He stops to catch his breath. “And you know how I even know we’re right? How people like you and me know we’re right? We prove it by being right. Do you know what I mean Gadsen?” Gadsen nods back slowly. “We’re not just gonna get your cat back, we’re gonna make sure no respectable American ever lays eyes on this cocksucker again.” He gets up to put on his coat. “If anti-fascist fascists think they can assault cops and destroy property then why the fuck can’t we push back?” The silence after the question confused Gadsen. “I’m asking you a question. Why not? Cause we’re better than them? They think the exact same thing and here they go pushing us around in conversation, in the news, even in the streets! We’re getting your cat back, I promise you that Gadsen. This is more important than Whispers. This is a statement for our times.”
The air becomes confused. Gadsen doesn’t know which way to go. As Price puts on his steel-tipped boots, he feels with equal pull the need to act and the need to stop and think. The gravity of each force pulls his very being into peril. For a moment he sees it as the razor’s edge of decision. Then he convinces himself it’s a balancing act. Then he feels his center cleave entirely and the indecision transforms into purpose. Price grabs a baseball bat propped up in the foyer, “You know, my father was born in Louisville. You still play Gadsen?”
“Haven’t touched a glove in years.”
“That’s a damn shame.”
IV.
He rides shotgun, while Price drives between the lines. The sibilant consonants of a voice slip from the car speakers, and the streets are empty. Price has his hands at 2 and 10, good and steady. “You want to know why I’m helping you Gadsen? Why I’m driving out to help you with this entitled lowlife?”
“Why’s that?”
“Because somebody has to. We don’t talk about that anymore. Not even the Republicans. I’ll tell you what Gadsen, don’t tell anyone I said this but I think it's important we have liberals running around spouting off their nonsense. I do. You think I only want the same people with the same ideas running our country. No. An outstanding and definitive no. You see, there are those who stand in the middle and try to see both sides but they’re either paralyzed by neutrality or faking their impartiality. Then there are those on either side of the fence. But then you get to the outer edges of the spectrum. The radicals. Who is it on the left? Fanatical artist-types, the types that were pacifists in World War II, and idealistic anarchists that were not beholden to the rules. I have a respect for them. Even in their lunacy. They resisted the herd. They pushed back against the status quo. Did they make the world think like them? Did they bring the revolution they called for? No. Of course not. They might have steered the ocean liner called society half a degree to the left but that was it. They’re idealists and they think words and ideas are gonna be the way to make people better than they actually are. A lot of conservatives are like that too. But what about the other side of the spectrum? What’s the inverse of these effeminate poets who think writing a treaty is going to change the world? I’ll tell you Gadsen. It’s violence. Violence. Violence makes the world go round, the underbelly of everything from breakfast cereal to the color of your car. It keeps everything in check, it keeps these effeminate poets I’m talking about from pulling the rug out from under us and enter total fucking anarchy. If we subscribed to their dazed sense of total freedom, well, then a greater violence you could never believe would wipe the human race right off the planet. We need that dream of freedom Gadsen, and the right says they believe in it and they do, but they’re the realists who have to sugarcoat it with patriotism and tax breaks. They’re the ones who start wars when people get too comfortable. They’re the ones who keep dreamers on earth. It’s this scum of the earth thug that represents anarchy, that represents unbounded freedom. If people think that total freedom is going to get them to a heaven on earth, then they’re in for a treat buddy. You have to act, and actions are inherently violent whether it be eating, working, or fucking. I’m sorry to say it, but nobody else will: some people don’t deserve freedom. Freedom’s not a right and too much of it spells the end of civil society.”
“Right.”
“These people think that just by saying something enough times it makes it real. I want to give them a test of the real real.” They pull up to the garage and as they exit the car and walk to the door, Price can’t keep from shouting, hostile to any ideas blocking the doorway for his volition. A light turns on across the street. Somehow, Price has Gadsen’s keys. “What makes something real isn’t thinking it. It’s being it. People follow the rules because they don’t want to be hurt and no story is ever gonna change that! No more theories for us. They break into your home and next thing you know you’ll be the one doing twenty-five to life for protecting your home. This man is a felon so you got every right to cut the fucker’s head off. You hear that you son of a bitch? We’ll show you what’s right!”
“Price! Quiet!”
As he turns the first of two locks, a memory or maybe a dream flows into his consciousness and a chill runs down his spine. Upon entering, the two intruders alarm only themselves, afraid to even turn on the light. When Gadsen sees the boy’s frozen gasp pointed at the ceiling, he remembers the same expression on the face of another man, a criminal he put down. In the black, the sweep of recognition pitches him backwards feeling why his heart is at rest, his mind dreamless, and his face rigid and blue. On the still warm lap of the boy is the faint image of Whispers, chattering in her sleep, and Gadsen prepares for a homer when he opens his mouth yet again.
Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.