The Good Side of Bad (Revision)

The Good Side of Bad


They have guns drawn. One on me, another on my brother. They press knees on his back, pull his arms and handcuff him. But everything’s already happened. There’s a small line of squad cars blocking off the road, a county wide evacuation in order. Sirens blare in the distance, the morning sky yellow from the sun trying to break through the smoke. The mountain burns behind my house.
Right now we’re the story, not the fire. Face flat on the lawn, hands laced behind our heads. My brother, Freddy, is a few feet away from me, tapping his forehead off the ground, saying “stupid, stupid, stupid,” over and over again. A cop comes and stands me up by my elbows.
Other officers are working on Dad in the driveway, a jacket covering his lower half, bandages pressed to his head. Another one picks up the gun Freddy had dropped on the porch when we’d dragged Dad outside.
“You wanna tell us what happened?” one of the cops says, and presses me against one of their cars. He crosses his arms and looks down at me.
And I think, how do you tell somebody about this? How far back will we have to go? If I told someone, would they believe I didn’t know anything about it? Didn’t know what my own brother might do?
In a situation like this, I wouldn’t even believe myself.

***

I picked my brother up from the bus station last night. He’d called me before he got on the bus, said his wife kicked him out. I was washing glasses at the Turkey Inn, a job I got last summer. Too young to work in a bar, but nobody seemed to care. It was slow and I watched the coverage of the fires approaching multi-million dollar homes in Rancho Santa Fe, fire trucks hosing off roofs and people rushing to fill buckets from their pools.
I got off work and saw Freddy curled up on a bench next to the station. I honked and pulled Dad’s car in the loading zone, flashed my high beams and stuck my head out.
“Trouble in paradise?” I said.
He sat up and shaded his eyes.
“What’re you doing?” I said. “Get in.”
When he got in he leaned the seat back, pulled on his hood and stuck his hands in his pockets.
“No bags?” I said.
“Don’t need any.”
I didn’t feel like going back home so we drove and parked in the overgrown end zone of my old high school football field, the goal post scabbed with rust, the uprights bent. We sat in the car and watched the aura of the fire closing in on town, sparks rising above the tree line.
“Dad’s throwing a party,” I said, and turned on the radio. “If you wanna go.”
Local AM DJs detailed the amount of open acres that’d been burned, how no structures had yet been damaged.
“Crazy,” I said.
Freddy turned the radio off and pointed to the brightest spot on the other side of the mountain.
“Think it’ll reach up here?”
Looking back at the school buildings, half of them demolished in the last few months to build a parking lot for the new high school down the street, I said, “If it does, you won’t have a ten-year reunion.”
Freddy got out and kicked through the grass. Dad’s mini-Chargers football had fallen from its space against the back window and I reached for it under the seat. Turned on the headlights and washed over a good part of the field.
“Go long,” I said, got out of the car and pumped my arm. Freddy turned. “Run.”
He sprinted, his hands still in his pockets. Out of my grip, the ball disappeared in the sky. Freddy stopped and looked up. The ball came down ten yards away from him.
“You’ve been practicing,” I said.
I used to watch him play Pop Warner football on this same field. Must’ve been seven, eight years old, a season or so before I started playing. He was the backup quarterback, even though Dad was one of the coaches. But he was mostly there to bring Tupperware containers full of oranges Mom sliced for him, fill up water bottles from the drinking fountain at halftime.
In between quarters I’d visit the sideline and hover around Dad, hear him pump up the offense, grab facemasks and slap shoulder pads. Give advice from his own playing days in college. He talked to parents before kickoff, told them what it takes to have a winning team. Dad was a quarterback for SDSU and could’ve gone pro, so he told me. But he got a busted knee his junior year and started dating Mom, dropped out, had Freddy. Settled down. End of story.
I’d sit next to Freddy on the bench and punch his thigh and knee pads as hard as I could. Knock on his helmet and say, “Hello, hello” through the ear hole. One time, when the score was too close to put him in, Freddy took off his helmet and slipped it on me. It was big enough that I could rotate it around my head no problem. He tightened the chin strap and secured it. I slapped my hands off the helmet, pounded my fists on my knees and ran in place.
“Think you’re tough?” I said, something I’d heard Dad say to him at practices. “Think you can go out there and prove it?”
I pointed somewhere other than the field and said, “Ready.” For some reason I growled. “Set.”
I heard referee whistles, a few claps and shouts from the aluminum stands behind us. Dad’s distant voice, raw, congratulating players. Kids yelling and whooping.
Freddy got in a lineman’s stance in front of me, his head down, hair hanging. My lips puffed out from the mouth guard attached to the facemask, a string of saliva hanging from my chin.
“Hike,” I said, and he sprung forward. He was bigger than me, and I couldn’t hold him back. His forearm drove in my chest and air exploded from me when he planted me on my ass. I rolled on my side and rocked, struggling for breath.
“You’ll get ‘em next time,” he said, and patted me on the helmet.
I spit out the mouthpiece and gasped. Freddy tried to help me up, but I ripped my elbow away, wanted to defend myself. Then Dad walked up.
“The hell you doing?”
He stood in front of Freddy and they were almost the same size. Freddy’s height was from Mom’s side. I flattened a hand over my chest, felt air rushing back into me. I started to say something and sat up, wanted to tell him whose fault it was. Dad gripped Freddy under his shoulder pads, pulled him close to his face.
“If you did that on the field,” he said. “Maybe I’d start you.” He spit to the grass and crossed his arms, nodded behind him. “Go clean up.”
Freddy picked up water bottles players had scattered along the sidelines, threw away orange peels and placed the tops back on the Tupperware. Dad came and stood me up by the face mask, kneeled eye-level.
“Hardest thing to teach,” he said. “Is taking a hit.”
He patted my ass and led me onto the fifty yard line with the rest of the team. We cheered, three times, the opponents’ name. Freddy walked to the parking lot, climbed in the back of Dad’s work truck and sat on the side of the bed. Stared out towards the mountains like he’d never noticed them before.
The smell of the fire was everywhere, ash beginning to settle on the roof, flakes of it falling like dying moths and catching on the overgrown grass, in Freddy’s hair. He pulled a fifth of whiskey from his jacket pocket. I slapped the Chargers ball in his gut and he threw it through the uprights. He leaned against the car and I rested an elbow on his shoulder. Took the bottle from his hand and swallowed a heavy shot from it.
“Thought you weren’t supposed to drink,” I said.
Last time I’d seen him, he’d just lost his academic scholarship up at Fresno State. Heard he got caught drinking more than once on campus, liquor on his breath during class. But didn’t know much more about it. I knew, though, that Mom and his wife urged him go to A.A.
“Fuck it,” he said, and grabbed the bottle from me. He bubbled down a quarter of it and said, “I shouldn’t do a lot of things.”
Driving home, I kept the speedometer under thirty. Cops had always been pricks around here and I didn’t want to get pulled over. When I parked at the bottom of the driveway, it was almost four in the morning. Muffled thumps of music came from inside the house, women laughing somewhere. The porch light turned on and a couple of people staggered out.
“Nothing’s changed,” Freddy said.
He stared up at the house, down the dirt road we both played on as kids.
“The town’s about to burn down,” I said.
Freddy hung his elbow out the window, chewed his nails, and uncapped the whiskey. Still hard to believe he had a wife and a kid up north. He took a quick pull from the bottle.
“You hang out with Dad a lot?”
I set the brake and looked at his face. Leaner. Tighter. He’d let his hair grow over his ears since last year. Sideburns curled and blended in with overgrown hair on his cheeks. He looked like a younger, thinner version of Dad.
“No,” I said, and smiled. “Living with him is enough.”
Freddy laid an arm across the top of the seat and looked up at the house. The moon filtered orange through the smoke. Lights from outlying parts of town hazed into the valley. He took his wallet from his pocket and set it on his lap, flipped it open and thumbed through pictures he kept in it.
I clicked on the dome light and leaned next to him, looked at a wallet size of his son and wife posing with Mom and the Fresno State bulldog. The kid and the mascot the only things smiling. He handed it over.
His wife, a woman I’ve met once when I visited them a couple of Christmases ago, not looking at the camera but not looking away either, a white bandage over the bridge of her nose, two dark crescents under her eyes. Their son’s bowl haircut, same color as Freddy’s, half covered by the mascot’s paw. And Mom glanced side eyed at the camera, her lips fixed in a tight line, a couple of fingers holding onto the boy’s shoulders, the same face she seemed to wear in every picture she’d taken with us.
“So,” I said. “What happened?”
I had a feeling what did, just wanted to see what he said. I’d seen him hit his wife once, that time at Christmas. He was drunk, which was sort of an excuse. They both were, arguing. About money, the house, things he was doing at school. It could’ve gone either way.
Mom and I were washing dishes when we heard bone on flesh, the slap of the chair against the vinyl tile and his wife’s hair fanned out around her head. The pink puff forming over her cheekbone. Mom went and picked up their son from his booster seat, a piece of broccoli dangling from his pudgy fingers while he said “Mama, Mama, boom,” his face half hidden on Mom’s shoulder as she hurried him to his room. I followed, stepped around Freddy who kneeled next to his wife, crying. Held her hand and said he was sorry.
Mom was on her knees next to the boy in his bedroom. Posters of animals on the wall, everything bright and colorful. No footballs or dump trucks. Mom fingered the length of his hair, reeled him in and hugged him whenever he turned to look at her. He didn’t seem to realize what was going on, flipping open his toy chest and pulling out everything he owned. Mom looked at me then, her eyes bubbling black and about to streak down her face. The way I’ll always remember her.
“You still got that girlfriend?” she said. I tried to think of the last girl of mine she’d met, but could only think of the high school girl I fingered at a party that previous summer. The heat of her crotch on my hand before she passed out on the giant trampoline we made out on. For some reason I nodded.
“You nice to her?”
I nodded again.
She stood, smoothed a hand over my face, and said, “You must’ve got some of the good side.”
The boy crawled on all fours and roared, fluttered his lips and raised his head like some terrible monster. Mom dropped down, and her and the boy crawled around together like that while I went to help Freddy pick up his wife.
I took the keys from the ignition and kicked open the door. Freddy closed the wallet and put it in the glove box. He parted his lips but didn’t say anything. I tried to hand the picture of his family back, but he just stared at it.
“Keep it,” he said, and pushed my hand away. He cracked his knuckles against the dash and picked at them, what looked like dried blood in the creases of his skin. I slid the picture in my shirt pocket.
“They ever coming down?” I said.
Freddy pinched the bridge of his nose. He circled his palm on his forehead and turned to me.
“They’ll need you to go visit.”

Five o’clock in the morning. Sirens whined in the distance and the fire crested over the mountain. I hadn’t heard anything about evacuations, but I watched neighbors tossing bags into their trunks, back out of their driveway. It was as if the entire neighborhood was leaving at once and there was nowhere to go.
We sat on the plastic chairs setup on the porch and faced the street. Cars honked when they drove past and I waved.
“Let’s go in,” I said, and looked through the living room window.
Dad and his friends splashed around in the jacuzzi on the back patio, steam fogging the outside of the sliding glass door. He’d bought it the day Mom and Freddy moved to Fresno, had the porch screened in and laid down green indoor/outdoor carpeting.
He made it into a trophy room, Chargers banners pinned to the wall, TV in the corner, a couple of small glass trophy cases hanging over the jacuzzi. Football trophies I’d received over the years were dusted over in one of them. The football all his teammates signed after he got injured was perched on a stand in a glass case all its own.
A couple of weeks before the divorce, I brought the football out. Freddy and I traced our fingers over the names sloppily signed onto the leather. We tossed it around in the backyard, gave our best Heisman poses while we collided into one another. Spiked it when we crossed imaginary goal lines. Dad came out back when I was in the middle of an Icky shuffle, the ball pointed high out of my hand, just before I drilled it to the ground.
Dad rushed toward me. He must’ve gotten home from work and we didn’t hear his truck pull up, the front door slam shut. He picked up the ball and went right to Freddy. Rotated and examined it. Picked a blade of glass from its laces.
“Don’t touch my shit,” he said, and hit the point of the ball off Freddy’s forehead. He didn’t look at me, and I never said anything, never took the blame for getting the ball out. When I went in our room later, Freddy was on the top bunk.
“Sorry,” I said. He had a red mark on his forehead, his eyes red lightning streaked, cheeks glossy. He laid back and said, “I’m used to it.”
A fire engine snuck around the traffic, bumped into the edges of driveways to maneuver. Then another. Freddy stood from the porch and went down the steps into the front yard. The light above the front door shadowed half of him. I opened the front door and stood halfway in the living room.
“Come on,” I said.
Freddy turned his back to me, pulled something out of his pants pocket, shoved it back in. I thought it might be another bottle of whiskey. He looked at the cars on the street, watched them inch forward. Smoke caught in my throat and I coughed, stuck my face in the bend of my elbow. Freddy buttoned up his jacket and stretched it low below his beltline. He clomped up the steps and came inside, stood and waited for me to close the door behind him.
“After you,” I said, and swept him inside as if he was an important guest.
Nobody noticed us come in. I recognized most of the men sitting in the jacuzzi, workers Dad hired for certain jobs where he was the foreman. Cement guys, bulldozer operators. Grunts he bossed around on site and later bought rounds for at the Turkey Inn. The women I recognized from other parties. Some of them looked like they could be in construction.
I turned up the radio, one of Dad’s Neil Young compilations, and went to the kitchen. Freddy sat on the couch, hung his head and let it bob like he was passing out.
“Drink?” I pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer and sang along with “A Heart of Gold.” Broke ice in two glasses.
A bomber plane flew overhead. I looked out the kitchen window and saw Dad stand up.
“They won’t let a little bonfire fuck up our night,” he said. He crushed his beer can and threw it against the screen window. Wing lights flitted up the mountain behind the house, and I could see the plane’s silhouette against the fire.
Dad’s boxers were plastered to his thighs, and one of the women sitting next to him pulled them down. Everybody laughed, and he reached into the water. His boxers bubbled on the surface and he climbed out, didn’t bother to cover himself with a towel. Went to the large metal bucket he’d filled with Bud Ice earlier that morning. I watched the bomber fly over the tree line and disappear. Dad shotgunned a beer, then shook another one and opened the porch’s screen door, poured a foaming line on the concrete.
“Now we’re safer,” he said, and laughed.
I smiled and said, “Jimmy’s at it again.”
Our father, the life of every party. I carried the drinks to the coffee table and sat next to Freddy, set the bottle between the glasses.
“Let’s go out back,” I said.
Freddy screwed up his face like it hurt to have vision.
“Does he know I’m here?” He pushed himself up from the couch. “Does anybody?”
I pinched his nipple and said, “Who gives a shit.”
Freddy glared at me and I stood and thumbed my nose, bobbed and weaved in front of him. Punched him in the arm, slapped his face, said, “Think you’re tough?”
He brushed past me, wavered down the hallway and looked at the few pictures hanging on the wall that Mom hadn’t taken with her. Each of my high school football portraits, from freshman to senior, were lined in order. One of him on Dad’s shoulders before I was born, standing on some jetty in Ocean Beach. Freddy’s toothy grin, his mushroom top hair blowing in the wind, his hands pushing the bill of Dad’s hat over his face.
Freddy took that picture off the wall and sat on the arm of the couch, laid it on his lap.
“He looks like you,” I said, and tapped Dad’s face.
Freddy breathed hard through his nose, slapped my hand away. He swiped the picture off his lap. It landed face up on the carpet and he stomped the glass with his heel.
“I’m taller,” he said.
He rubbed fingertips at his temples. The same thing he used to do before he got an asthma attack when he was younger.
“The hell’s the matter with you?” I said.
He took another breath and held it in his cheeks. Let it explode out his lips.
“How many people are out there?” he said.
I looked on the patio, could see the glow of Dad’s ass through the steam on the door.
“I don’t know. Eight, maybe.”
He stared at the TV. The sound was off, but a reporter stood in front of a smoking field. Firefighters walked behind her. A ticker scrolled at the bottom of the screen, warnings, areas being evacuated. It listed sections of the county, northern beaches, valleys, cities and towns east of I-5.
“Jesus,” I said when I saw our town listed. “All the times we wanted to burn this place down.” I chewed a piece of ice, elbowed Freddy in the hip and said, “Looks like we won’t get the chance.”
He faced me, and it looked like he might start crying.
“What now?”
Ever since Mom and Dad got divorced, before I started fourth grade, Freddy cried at everything. When Dad picked me up from my visits, he cried. I came back the next weekend, he swung open the door and cried. Freddy would hug me tight around the neck when I came in, kiss my ear hole with a loud echoed smack. He’d spread the tears over the face with the bend of his arm and say, “You miss your old Freddy Bear?”
What I called him when I first started talking.
They’d rented an apartment down the hill in El Cajon. Freddy wanted to live with Mom and I stayed with Dad. Dad taught me how to pick up blocks from blitzing linebackers, read defenses. It was my first year of football, and there was nothing Mom could teach me. But she wanted to be close to me while my brother finished up junior high, started high school. I loved Mom, still do. It was just that Dad had more to offer.
The reporter was interviewing some old woman who clutched a wet cat in her arms, pressed a knuckle at the corner of each of her eyes. The camera switched to a live shot of the fire about to jump a road somewhere in Escondido. Flames stitching low off the asphalt. Then back to the old lady again. The reporter put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder and the woman cried harder.
“Get over it,” I said, and took a drink. Held the liquor in my mouth until it stopped burning.
The phone rang. Freddy pushed himself up from the couch and stared down at it.
“It’s a new invention,” I said, and felt I could push him with my pinky and knock him over. He wavered and I picked up the receiver. It was Mom.
“Where’s your brother?” she said. Her voice was hoarse, harsher than I remembered. There was a child crying in the background, another voice.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said, and took a drink.
Long pause.
“Michael,” she said. “Where’s Freddy?”
I looked at him, his slow blinking eyes. Held the receiver above my head and said, “Telegram.”
Freddy snatched it from me. He didn’t say anything, just held the phone to his ear. Then: “No. Mom, no. No. I’ve already done it. Tell her it’s done, it’s over. Tell her I love her.”
He dropped the phone in my lap. Picked up his glass and drained it to the ice. Walked through the kitchen and stood in front of the sliding glass door. I picked up the receiver thinking Mom was still on the line, but all I got was a dial tone.
Jacuzzi steam clouded into the kitchen when Freddy opened the door. The women turned around and fixed their wet hair, the men sucked down their beers and hung their arms over the sides. Dad faced Freddy and his eyes popped open. He smiled and said something about how different Freddy looked, almost like a real man. He spread his arms and took a few steps toward him.
“Shit,” he said, motioning him closer with his fingers. “Can’t your old man get a hug?”
His pubic hair a dark patch against his pale skin. Dad reached out and tugged at Freddy’s sideburns.
“Look here,” he said, and turned to his friends. “Left a pussy, and came back a hairier one.”
He laughed and pulled Freddy in, kissed his cheek. Freddy lifted the bottom of his jacket. I thought he might pull out the other bottle of whiskey from his pocket. Pour a couple of shots in the cap and make amends. But I saw a metal grip sticking out, a flash of black when he turned from the kitchen light.
Before Dad dropped his hand, Freddy pointed a gun at him and grabbed his wrist. Yanked him close and cracked the butt off his forehead. Twice. Solid thumps that startled me to my feet. Pinned Dad’s throwing arm against the top of the jacuzzi and shot through his hand.
Dad sprung up and spilled backwards through the screen door and off the porch, bending the door from its hinges. He landed onto the ice plant covering the backyard. Someone screamed and Freddy scanned the gun over them. The women eased out of the jacuzzi and covered themselves with towels. The men stepped in front of Freddy and held their arms out. Said things like, “Easy now” and “Hold on.”
Freddy cocked the gun and they backed away, wrapped arms around the women. I hurried through the kitchen and saw Dad trying to crawl back onto the porch, one hand flat on top of his head. Blood sleeved his arm, scattered down and dripped off his elbow, black raindrops to the green carpet.
“What the hell?” I said.
Freddy aimed and shot the case with my trophies in it, glass exploding. The shelf fell from the wall after a few shots, pieces of my trophies and wood scattered over the ground. Everyone crouched, hopped over Dad and ran around the side of the house. Freddy aimed again, at the case holding Dad’s college football. He shot at it until the trigger clicked, the ball falling flat and misshapen, floating on the surface of the jacuzzi. Then sunk.
Freddy turned around, his mouth loose and open. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a handful of bullets. Slid the clip out. Reloaded. Dad looked at me, his eyes wide and chlorine burn red. I tried to say something else, but my knees locked when Freddy pressed the gun against the back of his head, flattening him. Freddy turned to me and said, “You don’t want to see this.”

The sun was coming up, the sky the color of a bruised peach. Blood everywhere. Dad army crawled out of the kitchen and Freddy stepped one foot on his back, reached down and tugged at what was left of Dad’s ponytail.
“Where you going?”
Freddy had knocked him a few more times, kicked him in the ribs so hard that Dad’s side was already bruising.
“No,” Dad said, and Freddy said, “You did this to yourself, old man.”
I moved in front of him and we were nose to nose. Placed my hand on top of the gun and tried to ease his hand down.
“Freddy,” I said. “Don’t.”
He slipped away and brought it to my forehead, thumbed the hammer, twisted the gun sideways. I felt my skin about to break.
“Move,” he said.
He repositioned the barrel, pressed harder.
“Got something to prove?” he said. I blinked, thousands of exploding black stars. Shook my head and put my hands up. Freddy turned away and punched the side of the refrigerator, the cabinets over the sink. Leaned his head over the sink and dry heaved.
Dad got on all fours. I stood him up by the armpits and tried to help him towards the front door. He slipped away and I bear hugged him before he fell to the floor. He was heavier than me, and we spun together in an awkward dance. Straightening him up, he clutched me and rested his forehead on my chest.
“Michael,” he said. “Michael.”
I squeezed the back of his neck, his eyes pinched, fluttering. His forehead was split open in two places, two bumps forming around the gashes. The blood was drying, dark Stucco on his face.
“Wake up,” I said, and slapped him on the chest. His eyes flapped open, and for a second he looked clear, conscious.
“Go,” I said, and nudged him through the living room. “Run.”
Freddy turned around and rushed across the room. He held the gun by the barrel and hit Dad in the back of the neck, dropped him face flat to the carpet. He flipped the gun around and held the tip to Dad’s temple. Crouched next to him. He flipped him over with his knee and Dad rolled on his back, one arm flopping over his face. Freddy hovered the barrel over his crotch. Toggled Dad’s dick with it.
“You like that?” he said. “Feel like a man now, motherfucker?”
He pressed the barrel of the gun against Dad’s injured hand.
“Feel it,” he said. “Live through the pain.”
He jabbed him in the gut and said, “Pussy, pussy, pussy. Ain’t nothin in this world can toughen you up.”
Hisses of breath, like a slow leaking tire, broke through Dad’s lips. Freddy stood and kicked his side.
“Get up,” he said, but Dad didn’t move.
“I think he’s dying,” I said, and went next to Freddy. I grabbed onto the bend of his arm and pulled him, tried to go eye to eye but he looked away. He placed the hand holding the gun on top of his own head, tapped it off his scalp. He cleared his throat and looked at the carpet
“He’ll never die.” He eased his arm away. “Not ever.”
The gun dangled from his fingers.
“Then let him go,” I said, and reached for it. “Let him go.”
We caught each other’s eyes, and I felt like we were kids again, brows wrinkling, eyes slit, trying to make the most serious face, outdo one another until someone cracks and smiles or has to turn away and laugh so hard our lungs hurt.
“Come on,” I said, and forced a smile. Wiggled my fingers for him to hand over the gun. Thought I had him. “Gonna be a pussy your whole life?”
Freddy flinched and shoved me, drove his forearm into my chest. I fell back onto the couch and he leaned over me, turned my face towards the kitchen by pressing the gun to my temple.
“Pussy?” he said, and bit his bottom lip. Flared his nostrils. “Who’s a pussy now?”
Through the windows, the sun crowned above the mountain and I could hear helicopters blade through the air, roars of engines and sirens, people’s voices outside. Smoke rose from the field behind our house, mixture of white and black floating up toward the low cruising planes.
Freddy began to sob. He gripped my throat. He brought his hand up and flattened it against my face. Squished my nose, my lips. The warm smell of sweat on his skin.
“It’s me, Freddy,” I said. “It’s me.”
He stuck the gun under my chin and I tightened my jaw. Tears welted at the corners of his eyes, rolled down his face in separate paths. His chin dimpled, lips quivered. Low words bumbled out of him.
“I can’t shake it,” he said.
The gun grazed my eyelids. Parts of it rattled and I could feel it on and off again against my eyelashes.
“It’s me.”
Freddy’s hand at my neck. He squeezed, let go, squeezed again. His hand shook around my Adam’s apple. Everything blurry, out of focus. I could barely breath, taking in gasps when he eased up. I opened my eyes, saw his squinting face an arm’s length away. Closed them again.
“It’s me, Freddy Bear.”
I waited for the snap of the hammer, breathed in and held it. Closed my eyes and listened to the sound the world made when I wasn’t there.

***

Freddy and I are led to the nearest squad car, its roof lights flashing. Freddy hangs his head, face blank, flat. Nobody else around the entire neighborhood. The road block clears to let an ambulance past. It skids in my driveway and paramedics jump out before it comes to a complete stop, open the back doors. They grab duffel bags and begin to put air back into Dad, pump his chest. Bandage what’s left of his hand. Move him on top of an orange plastic thing, fasten something around his neck. He’s not moving when they slide him in the back of the van.
Cops press our stomachs against the car. Hands shaking a little. They pat my back pockets, reach around and smooth over my sock lines, my waistband. One of them slams Freddy’s face to the top of the trunk when he tries to squirm away. All he can do is laugh to stop himself from crying.

All That Shines Isn't Golden

All That Shines Isn’t Golden




“You got that Canadian bacon or what?” she says to the waitress. She’s been at the counter for ten minutes, screwing our timing. Then a bullet rips through her shoulder and sprawls her backwards on the tile. I’m in the booth at the back of the restaurant with a limp slice of pizza greasing my paper plate. Holding an unloaded shotgun under the table.
“Holy shit, Jimmy,” Wiley says. “Run!”
He looks at me through the pantyhose on his head and hurries to the front door, back to the counter again. His face a sandy impression behind the fabric. Bushy eyebrows flattened. Nose and lips squished.
It’s before lunchtime, the kids and parents are in the back playing skee-ball, drowning in the pool of plastic balls. That’s why we’ve picked this joint, two separate rooms, thick doors between the restaurant and party area. But this one lady, this Canadian bacon lady, wouldn’t leave the damn waitress alone.
She moans, the waitress standing over her, thin tributaries of blood flowing across the rainbow colored polka dot floor. It’s amazing no one else is coming, not from the play room or the kitchen. Everything’s so loud in here they probably thought the gunshot was part of a video game, a balloon popping.
I’m up and next to Wiley, my partner and nephew. He’s wired, I can see the tendons working in his neck. His real name’s Wallace, but we’ve called him Wiley since birth.
“The cash,” I say, and try to sound hard. Fact is I’m pissed he had a live round. We talked about it in the car beforehand, no bullets. But he had one, moving the nubby bastard from knuckle to knuckle like you would a quarter. This is his first job and I told him he needed to work the nerves out in another way, that bullets just worsen it. He must’ve slipped it in the chamber when I wasn’t looking.
The waitress looks me in the eyes. She’s already seen my face. I ordered the slice of pie and an orange soda from her earlier, so it didn’t matter much. But I know she hadn’t gotten a good look. What does she make, five and a quarter an hour? You expect someone to remember every feature of every customer they served pizza to at that wage? But now she’s pegged me, there’s something about her face that’s changed. Probably tell a cop the size and shape of every feature above my neckline, make something out of them, like a goddamn Rorschach test.
“Marcy,” I say, and finger her towards me. She doesn’t move.
Rule #1: Know as many names as you can before you raid a place. Check name tags, tops of your receipts. Just open your goddamn ears when workers talk to one another. Knowing a small piece about them only helps.
“Marcy,” I say again, and nod at the floor.
The woman on the ground is wailing. Writhing. Smears blood all over the tile when she swipes her arms. I pump the shotgun for effect and point it down at her. Look at the waitress over the stock.
“Now.”
She stands in front of me, cute little thing, her knees touching one another underneath those ridiculous plaid pants they make them wear. Her head hangs and I can see small flakes of skin on her scalp.
“It’s okay,” I say, and drop a hand on her shoulder. Squeeze. Something about human touch in a time like this. I lift her chin up and say, “Get us a bag, sweetie.”
I know I’ve got her, but I make a mistake: I take my eyes off Wiley.
From nowhere he runs up and clocks the butt of the gun off the back of her head, drops her to a clump in my arms. The panty hose has wrinkled over his face and his chin pokes out. He’s breathing too hard, his eyes about to burst from their sockets.
“Your grandma’s bedroom,” I say, a device we’ve worked out a few days ago. A calming vision if something should go wrong.
He goes to the woman he shot and kicks her, gets down on all fours and screams in her face. So loud a Mexican peeks out from the sections of plastic sheeting hanging over the kitchen’s door. This Pedro motherfucker scans the scene and his eyes pop white.
“Freeze, homie!” I say, and lay Marcy on the floor. Shoulder the shotgun. Too late. Pedro’s gone.
Wiley stands up and spins around, blood stained knees and elbows. It’s as if he doesn’t know where he is, lost, looking for some sort of focal point. When he finds me, he smiles, and I step forward and slam the stock of the shotgun off his forehead. Drop him next to the woman who’s all but passed out.

There’s a cop car idling through the parking lot soon after we get home. I lay Wiley on the couch, bolt the door and shut all the blinds in my apartment. Poke an eye through the kitchen window, the barrel of Wiley’s .38 against my cheek. His hands are bunched under his chin, knees clenched on top of the cushions. A lightning bolt blood stain on his forehead.
Outside, it’s one of those California winter days. If I could see the ocean, the sun would be sparkling off it right about now, a stiff breeze blowing sand and skittering pieces of seaweed. Dogs and joggers and paling December skin soaking up the heatless sun along the shoreline. But there’s a couple of miles of low grade apartment buildings and crossing webs of telephone wires blocking any sort of view.
Dealers in the apartment next to us stumble out to the patio, a couple of joints hanging from their lips. They about light up when they notice the cop, then rip the spliffs from their mouths and whistle down the walkway toward the stairs. Break into a sprint when they’re through the parking lot and out of sight.
“Trouble?” she says, and I turn the gun on her. Ram my elbow into the blinds and almost knock them off their brackets. She jerks back and puts her hands up.
“Jesus, Regan,” I say, and ease the gun’s hammer back down.
I knew she was home, waiting, but it’s still a fresh feeling having her around. She flips me off and sits on top of the kitchen table and stares at me, a towel wrapped around her, one turbaned on top of her head. Her body glitters with beads of water, and I can’t believe she’s kept up this well after all her years.
“No,” I say, and flatten my back to the refrigerator and watch the squad car park in the handicap spot in front of the manager’s door. “Everything’s peachy.”
Wiley stirs and rolls over, his face pressed into the back cushions. He mumbles something and swats a hand, coming to. Sits up and rolls his head from shoulder to shoulder, rubs the back of his neck. Regan rushes over to him and tries to rest his head on her chest, stroke his hair. She flashes me one of her squinty eyed looks when he pushes away from her.
“Pull the car around,” I say, and toss the keys in his lap.
Regan shakes a cigarette out from its pack on the coffee table, holds it between her fingers but doesn’t light it. Everything had been her plan, and I feel I should walk over and shake her. Push her for the way things had gone. Wiley stumbles into the kitchen and I grab his face between my hands, look him in the eye. Slap his cheek and squeeze the back of his neck before he goes to the front door. He cracks it open and checks the scene, and I can’t help but smile. When he’s gone, I grab a beer from the refrigerator and sit in the recliner in front of Regan. The way the towel’s open between her legs, I can see where Wiley came from.

What we have is a bad situation.
Wiley still doesn’t have his feet under him while he wavers through the parking lot towards the car. He regains balance against neighbors’ trunks, sits on open tailgates. Wades through a group of kids hopping a basketball back and forth to each other. Dodges cars backing out from their spaces. I pulled a hat down low on his head to hide the growing bump, wiped off most of the blood with a wet paper towel. To anyone else, he might just look drunk.
From the window, it’s like watching a movie. Everything in tangled motion. Panning and tracking in and out like a Ridley Scott scene. The cop’s talking to the manager, and the old super raises his cane and points out the entire complex. A community of thieves and murderers.
Regan’s getting dressed, packing up a few of her things because we don’t know how long we might have to run. I know they’ve tracked her to me. Like I said, this was her plan, the Pizza Palace. She worked there until last week as one of the mascots during parties. Some sort of cartoonish rodent. I’d gone to see her once, and she posed with kids for pictures, let them grab her pink tail and twirl around until she fell. Then got up and did it all over again without even a thank you.
Don’t know how she did it, the humiliation, her body wrapped in twenty pounds of padding and cloth, the grease and stink of dozens of little fingers streaked all over. Before she got fired, she said she kept working to case the joint out for me, three months worth of inside information. But I think she stayed as a matter of revenge against herself. Or tried to make up lost times. She never got to see Wiley grow up.
Wiley makes it to the car, shakes his head before he gets in the driver’s seat to clear what’s left of the cobwebs. I’ve been through this before, and I get butterflies that the cop’s on our trail. And I figure we could’ve just left breadcrumbs and gotten it over faster. But they have what you call standard procedures. Can’t go knocking down anyone’s door for nothing.
“Vamoose,” I say, and head into the bedroom. Open the back window and stuff the gun in my waistband. Regan’s got a couple of plastic bags full of clothes, some knick knacks she’s collected since she’s moved here. I don’t have time to argue and drop the bags out the window, grab her wrist and help her stand on top of the bed. Nudging the small of her back, I say, “Jump.”
Rule # 2: If anything should go wrong, have a getaway plan. Meet by the dumpster, that’s my plan, always has been for whichever partners I’ve had. Dumpsters are one thing that’s constant. Always in the back, rarely moved, and you don’t get any sort of regular individuals, the type that might point you out, hanging around them. Wiley knows this, or should. I’d told him half a dozen times before everything went to hell.
Regan and I make our way through the weeded gauntlet behind the complex, full of air condition units and broken bottles and blown over trash. Most of the back windows are covered with bed sheets or tinfoil or foggy bathroom glass. I point the gun at each one we pass, just in case some tweeker or shut-in happens to take a look at the view. Regan’s got her fingers dug in the back pocket of my jeans, keeping up.
“Oh God, Oh God,” she says. “My baby.”
I should slap her. She hasn’t been around Wiley for more than three months his entire life, just popped up when Mom died and begged to move in with us. And now she thinks she needs to protect him? That he needs her? With me here? I should’ve never taken her in. But when she showed up, hugging all up on me as if she’d just gotten back from a long tour of duty, how could I say no?
I hear the engine roar and kick through the weeds and blown over trash. Stand on the dumpster and see the chrome bumper shine around the corner. Then jump to the asphalt like it’s a black pool of water that’ll break our fall.

I hit a 7-11 with my brother, Frank, when I was thirteen. He pulled us up around three in the morning, when cops throughout the city switched shifts. Shifts last twelve hours. A new, weary eyed group of piglets punch in before the sun’s even a fetus in the great dark womb. Drink coffee and eat donuts for the first hour of their day. And every convenient store in the county’s for the picking.
The 7-11 was just off I-5 in National City, a land of gangsters and illegals. Plastic nativity sets in front yards, drying clothes forever dangling and swaying from lines stretched between trunks of dead palm trees. Spray paint tags scratched across stucco and concrete.
The on-ramp was a few blocks away. Wiley was about six months old then, asleep in his car seat next to me. Pacifier in the shape of a butterfly puckered halfway out his lips. Frank had told Mom that we were going on a drive around the neighborhood, that the curves would ease Wiley back to sleep. Which was true, my brother was never a full-blown liar. But reasons behind my coming along were never explained.
The pellet gun he’d given me warmed against my stomach. It looked real enough, stark black, lined sights. A little weight to it. I asked Frank if the cashier would notice how small the end of the barrel was. He pointed his .38 inches from my nose and said, “Would you?”
He parked in the farthest spot from the entrance, turned the headlights off and kept the engine going. There wasn’t another car around, the streets behind us a foggy orange glow from the streetlamps. Wiley stirred and let out one single cry. Frank turned and covered the gummy mouth with his hand, stuck his pinky in and let Wiley suck.
“Go get em, Jimmy,” he said, and winked at me.
I put a finger in one of Wiley’s sprawled hands, his weak grip tightening before I pulled away.
With the hood of my sweatshirt low over my face, I couldn’t look up all the way, so I watched my feet make careful steps over the parking curbs, up onto the sidewalk leading inside. I could see my breath but it didn’t feel cold. The door chirped when I pushed it open.
Lights hummed overhead, machines percolated and sloshed at the back of the store. There was a woman, Chinese, something, standing behind the counter and shuffling through rolls of lottery tickets under the glass. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Frank’s car half washed from the security lights in the lot. I stood in front of the Slurpee machine, watched the blues, greens, and reds being paddled around. Soft music playing somewhere, a different language maybe. The clerk knocked on top of the counter.
“Can help you?” she said.
Making a line for the front door, I saw Frank stand from the car, shooing me to stay inside. I pulled the gun out and held it close to my leg, sidestepped to the magazine racks. Rolled my shoulders. Cracked knuckles against my thighs and watched a single car rolling by on the street. I almost dry heaved over the boat trader weeklies when Frank flashed past, kicked through the doors and held the gun at arm’s length.
“Ain’t got all day,” he yelled, and stepped to the counter. The clerk fell back into the display of beef jerky and tobacco and collapsed. Frank looked at me, his eyes wild, nostrils flared, and I wondered if Wiley was sleeping through all of this, the gentle vibrations of the car’s engine lulling him to sleep.

“We going to Mexico?” Wiley says, and I look at him in the rearview. Nod.
“Si.”
He hasn’t shaved in more than a month, patches of wiry hair on his cheeks and jaw. Circles of smooth skin between the hairs. If he still went to school, I’d make him shave. But he made the decision after Mom died. Didn’t think anybody could teach him as well as her.
He bites into half a taco and hot sauce sticks along the corners of his mouth. We drove through Jack-in-the-Box and bought bags full of dollar menu items. I can’t eat at times like this, my chest compressed and full of thrashing beats.
Regan’s next to him. She pushes up his hat and examines the purpling bump on his forehead, licks her fingers and rubs off the remainder of dry blood. She leans in and tries to kiss it.
“Better?” she says. Wiley finishes his taco and wipes his mouth with the inside of his bicep.
“No,” he says, and scoots away from her.
We’re still half an hour from the border without traffic, but rush hour’s starting to build once we pass downtown. The sun’s dropped behind the horizon of skyscrapers and new condos and construction cranes. Slivers of it sectioning the freeway in pillars of dull light. The harbor gleams in front of us.
There’s a gap in the lane next to me and I roar into it. Yards of empty concrete. A sea parting. I think we’re through the worst when a line of cars merge in front of me, like it’s their last road to salvation. Salvation. I laugh that I even thought of this word, probably heard it in a late night black and white movie while I was blueprinting the robbery. Laugh harder when I think we’ll find it in Tijuana.
We inch, a girl in the car next to us screaming along with a Christina Aguilera song. Bass thumping in another car I can’t make out. The .38’s a click away in the glove box, but I have to tell myself ten and two. Whiten my knuckles along the steering wheel—ten and two.
“Look at that bridge,” Wiley says. He leans forward and crosses his arms on top of the front seat, rests his chin on the back of his hands. Taco breath gushes out of him. Regan looks too and tries to caress his shoulder, but he shakes her off. She turns toward the back window and covers her eyes with strands of her hair so we won’t see her sob.
Wiley’s seen the Coronado Bay Bridge countless times, I’d taken him to Silver Strand beach when he was younger. Carried him over washed up syringes and Styrofoam. But the bridge is always a welcome sight for him. Maybe he’ll be an engineer, an architect. Something he can use that abstract brain of his for, the way he looks at things that nobody else appreciates.
He slides across the seat and sticks his head out the window and looks at the curve of the structure rise and rise above the water, falling, like a bad case of scoliosis, to the strip of land on the other side.
“We going across it?” he says.
I look at the ocean of cars corralling us in and shake my head.
“Don’t got our swim trunks,” I say.
Regan’s crying now. She has a tough go at controlling the dimples on her chin, two shotgun streams of clear snot snail tracking from her nostrils. She bumbles and Wiley brings his head back in. I adjust the rearview.
“What’s wrong with her?” he says.
I reach back and thumb some of the sauce off his struggling mustache.
“Don’t know,” I say, and press the horn until the entire freeway follows in an orchestra of fried nerves.

Car chases were rampant the summer Frank was released from jail for the second time. A new California fad ever since Orenthal James. Seemed like there were several breaking news flashes on the hour. One afternoon, I watched his Honda swerve through traffic from the city of Orange to Oceanside to halfway to Coronado. Swipe a motorcyclist into the median, fishtail into the cement divider. Eye in the sky followed him for miles. The car was easy to recognize, the roof oxidized to a rusty color, splashes of yellow over the hood.
About eight years earlier, the year Frank was first sent up stream to serve a two to five, Mom thought it was a good idea to keep Wiley occupied. Me and the kid did odd jobs around the house. He was three or four then, handed me the wrong tools to fix leaky faucets, helped pulled weeds from the herb garden. One day, I thought we’d paint the garage door. But when I fell asleep under the orange tree in the front yard, before we even got started, Wiley snuck away with the paintbrush and Jackson Pollacked the car.
“Daddy pretty,” he said, and flicked the paintbrush several more times before I grabbed him.
He smeared paint on my cheeks, started to cry.
“Yeah,” I said, and kissed his temple. “Daddy pretty.”
Every channel aired the chase, and Mom didn’t realize it was Frank’s car. She was just disappointed they cut away from the Price is Right. I was glued to the TV, couldn’t get away. I cheered him on, pumped my fist when he dodged a school bus, slapped my knee when a good Sam tried to block the lanes only to get spun around by Frank’s fender.
He’d promised Wiley he’d take him to the beach that afternoon. Hadn’t seen his kid in years and Wiley sat on the floor in Mom’s bedroom, waiting. Legs spread wide so I could see the netting of his swim trunks, his face and upper body pale, almost blue from the amount of sun block he’d put on himself. He bounced a Superball between his legs, and looked disappointed it didn’t catch much air off the carpet.
Mom stood at the window with the drapes parted, rose to her tiptoes whenever a car passed by. Although Wiley was almost a teenager then, she still covered his ears when those cars kept going.
“Goddamn him,” she said, and looked at me.
I could’ve told her Frank was preoccupied, but the way Wiley looked, bouncing the ball a few inches off the carpet, I didn’t have it in me.
The news broke to another story, said they’d keep us up to date on the situation. When it switched back, squad cars and sirens surrounded the Honda on the middle of the Coronado Bay Bridge. Half its front end smashed into the railing. The camera was shaky, the whirr of the helicopter cut through the newscaster’s report. Wiley came and sat with me when the picture zoomed in on the car, yellow paint crinkled and bent from the impact. Panning to the horizon, the sun was a great orange ball floating on the choppy water. I put my arm around him, held him close as the shot scanned and focused on the ornate roof of Hotel Del Coronado, fronds of palm trees. Then the screen went black, fuzzy, faded in to the reporters live in-studio. Their stunned faces told the story and I told Wiley to go wait outside.
They said the driver had jumped.

The Good Side of Bad

Joshua Landers
jdlanders@gmail.com








The Good Side of Bad



My brother pushes the point of the gun in Dad’s back and says, “Open your eyes.”
The sun’s coming up and smoke’s all around. Leafless trees on top of the mountain, their trunks gray as burning coals. The scrub brush and chaparral burned to a hard black surface. The jacuzzi is half full, a couple of household buckets I’d used to put out the initial flames floating barrel side on the surface of the water.
“See this?” my brother says. He kicks the back of Dad’s legs and knocks him down to all fours. Then goes and stands next to the patio furniture, throws a plastic recliner near Dad’s head. Ashes swirl around them.
I blink, thousands of exploding black stars. Hear my brother start to cry, choke it back. Dad struggles to open the sliding glass door leading into the kitchen, crawls halfway inside. My brother kicks him to the tile, puts his foot between his shoulder blades and flattens him.
“Freddy,” I say. “Don’t”
The toe of his shoe digging in, the shaky barrel of the gun against Dad’s head, he says, “You did this.”

I picked my brother up from the bus station last night. He called me the day before, said his wife needed a break from him. I’d been drinking at the Turkey Inn, watching coverage of the county wide fires burning homes in the inland sections of San Diego, desperate people hosing off roofs while flames punched back fences.
“Only a matter of time,” the bartender said.
I nodded and finished my beer.
I showed up half an hour late, saw Freddy curled up on a bench next to the station. I honked and pulled in the loading zone, flashed my high beams and stuck my head out.
“Trouble in paradise?” I said.
He sat up and shaded his hands in front of his face.
“What’re you doing?” I said. “Get in.”
He leaned the seat back, closed his eyes.
“No bags?” I said.
He pulled his hood on, crossed his arms over his chest. “Don’t need any.”
We drove and parked in the overgrown end zone of the old high school football field, the goal post scabbed with rust, the uprights bent. We watched the aura of the fire closing in on our town, sparks rising above the tree line.
“Dad’s throwing a party,” I said. “If you wanna go.”
Freddy spiked the empty fifth of whiskey he was drinking on the track circling the field.
“I didn’t know you drank,” I said.
He slipped a full one out from inside his jacket and said, “You don’t know everything.”
I let him drive the back roads to Dad’s house. He seemed to remember most of the curves winding around the mountain, the sharp turns. Repositioned the rearview and kept the speedometer under thirty. Cops had always been pricks around here.
“Nothing’s changed,” he said.
He parked at the bottom of the driveway.
“We got an Arby’s,” I said.
Freddy put his elbow out the window, chewed his nails, and grabbed the whiskey. Hard to believe he had a wife and a kid up north in Fresno, another one on the way.
He checked the rearview and took a quick pull from the bottle. Set the brake and removed the keys from the ignition.
“You talk to him a lot?”
I looked at his face. Leaner. Tighter. Hadn’t seen him in more than three years, and he’d let his hair grow over his ears. Sideburns that’d once been clean cut at the temple now curled and blended in with overgrown hair on his cheeks.
“No,” I said, and smiled. “Living with him is enough.”
Freddy laid an arm across the top of the seat and looked up at the house. The moon filtered orange through the smoke. The lights from outlying parts of town hazy throughout the rest of the valley.
Muffled thumps of music came from inside the house, women laughing somewhere. The porch light turned on and a couple of people staggered out. Freddy took his wallet from his pocket and set it on his lap, flipped it open and thumbed through pictures he kept in it.
I turned on the dome light and leaned next to him, looked at a wallet size of his son and wife, posing with Mom and the Fresno State bulldog. The kid and the mascot the only things smiling.
He handed it over.
His wife, a woman I’ve never met in person, not looking at the camera but not looking away either. Their son’s bowl headed hair half covered by the mascot’s paw. And Mom glancing side eyed at the camera, her lips fixed in a tight line, a couple of fingers holding onto the boy’s shoulders, the same face she seemed to wear in every picture I’d ever seen of her.
“So,” I said. “What happened?”
Freddy parted his lips but didn’t say anything. Then closed the wallet and put it in the glove box. I tried to hand it back to him. He eyed the picture gripped by my thumb and forefinger.
“Keep it,” he said, and pushed my hand away. He draped his wrists over the steering wheel and stared at the dash. I slid the picture in my front pocket.
“They ever coming down?” I said.
Freddy pinched the bridge of his nose. He ran his palm in circles on his forehead, leaving a red splotch on his skin, and turned to me.
“They’ll need you to go visit.”

The kitchen’s on fire, smoke rising in thick arms and spreading gray across the ceiling. I flap my jacket at the flames burning the bottom of the tablecloth, take a shoe off and slap at the curtains over the window. I get a face full of smoke and stumble next to Freddy. He holds the gun loose in his fingers.
“The fuck you doing?” I say.
Dad’s crawling down the hallway, naked, one hand rolled inside a beach towel. Blood’s matted in his belly hair and has dried in zigzag patterns on his shins, dotted on his feet.
Freddy tightens his grip on the gun and stands over him. Kicks him in the side so that he rolls on his back, hovers the barrel over his crotch. Toggles Dad’s dick with it.
“You like that?” he says, and his voice cracks. “Feel good, motherfucker?”
Dad flips over and army crawls, but Freddy steps on the back of his knee. Slaps his ass and sticks the barrel so deep in his crack that Dad coughs.
“Sick,” Freddy says. “Filthy.”
I look down at Dad. His face pressed against the floor, lips working. His toes scraping the carpet.
Freddy slaps him with the gun again and says, “Dirty, dirty, dirty.”
Dad’s head rises, his eyes wide and chlorine burn red. I try to say something, kneel next to him, but my knees lock when Freddy cocks the gun. Shades his other hand above the barrel.
He reaches in his pocket. Tosses me the car keys.
Says, “You don’t want to see this.”

Sirens whined in the distance. The fire crested over the mountain.
Freddy asked me for a cigarette and my lighter, although I’d never seen him smoke. He slid the cigarette behind his ear and rolled sparks from the lighter, flipped it between his fingers. Kept flipping it then put it in his pocket.
Dad stepped onto the porch, a towel wrapped around his waist, his head moving in and out of the security light above the door.
Freddy pointed and said, “Is that him?”
I nodded.
Somewhere above a bomber droned. The people standing outside looked up, howled, the women pulling the collars of their shirts below their cleavage.
Dad pumped his beer in the air when the silver flash of the plane banked over the roof.
“You ain’t fucking up my night,” he said, crushed his can and threw it in the yard.
Wing lights flitted up the mountain behind the house, and I could see the plane’s silhouette against the fire.
Freddy lowered in his seat, his face close to the steering wheel.
“Does he know I’m here?” he said, and turned off the dome light. He stared off at the neighboring houses up the street, the overgrown field across the way, through the back window, and said, “Does anybody?”
I popped the handle and pushed the door open with my knee.
“Who gives a shit?” I pinched his nipple. “You’re still soft.”

“This isn’t happening.”
I step over Dad and he crawls behind me.
“This isn’t happening,” Dad says again, and grips the bottom of my sweatshirt.
Freddy drives the gun to my chest.
“Move,” he says.
I straighten my arms out, fingers splayed.
“Hold on,” I say. “It’s me.”
He grabs one of my wrists and pulls me toward him. Presses the tip of the gun to my cheekbone, what feels like a hollow pipe digging in.
“Come on,” I say. “Just a minute. Think what you’re doing.”
He wraps a hand around my throat. My fingers graze his shirt, his chest. He clamps his jaw and resets his finger over the trigger.
“Don’t make me,” he says, and squeezes harder.
“Wait,” I say. “It’s me. It’s me.”

Three in the morning and static crackled out of the speakers.
Dad and his friends were in the jacuzzi on the back patio, steam fogging the outside of the sliding glass door leading outside. He’d bought the jacuzzi the day Mom and Freddy moved to Fresno, charged it on one of his credit cards.
Nobody noticed us come in. I recognized some of Dad’s friends from certain jobs we’d had. Cement guys, bulldozer operators. Grunts. The women I recognized from other parties. Some of them looked like they could be in construction.
I turned off the radio and went to the kitchen. Freddy sat on the couch and pressed a hand against his forehead.
“Drink?” I said, and pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. Broke ice in two glasses.
Another plane flew overhead. I looked out the kitchen window and saw Dad stand up. His boxers were plastered to his thighs, and one of the women sitting next to him pulled them down. Everybody laughed, and he reached into the water. His boxers bubbled on the surface and he climbed out, didn’t bother to cover himself with a towel. Went to the large metal bucket he’d filled with Keystone Ice earlier that morning.
I watched the bomber fly over the tree line and disappear.
Dad shotgunned a beer, then shook another one and poured a foaming line on the edge of the concrete.
“Now we’re safe,” he said, and laughed.
I smiled and brought the drinks to the coffee table, set the bottle between the glasses.
“Wanna go outside?” I said.
Freddy walked down the hallway, looked at the few pictures hanging on the wall that Mom hadn’t taken with her. One of me in Pop Warner, one of him on Dad’s shoulders before I was born, standing on some jetty in Ocean Beach. Freddy’s toothy grin, his hands pushing the bill of Dad’s hat over his face.
He took the picture down and sat on the arm of the couch, laid it on his lap.
“Look at your face,” I said, and tapped the frame. “You two look good together.”
I laughed.
Freddy breathed hard through his nose, slapped my hand away and flipped the picture over.
“It was never good,” he said, and swiped the picture off his lap. It landed face up on the carpet and he stomped the glass with his heel. “Never.”
He rubbed fingertips at his temples. The same thing he used to do before he got an asthma attack when he was younger.
“You okay?” I said.
He took another breath and held it in his cheeks. Let it explode out his lips.
“How many people are out there?” he said.
I looked on the patio, could see the glow of Dad’s ass through the steam on the door.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Eight, maybe.”
He stared at the TV. The sound was off, but a reporter stood in front of a smoking field. Firefighters walked behind her. A ticker scrolled at the bottom of the screen, warnings, areas being evacuated. It listed sections of the county, northern beaches, valleys, cities and towns east of I-5.
“Jesus,” I said when I saw our town listed. “All the times we wanted to burn this place down.”
I tongued a piece of ice in my mouth, elbowed Freddy in the hip and said, “Looks like we won’t get the chance.”
Freddy faced me, and it looked like he might start crying.
“What now?” I said.
Ever since Mom and Dad got divorced, before I started fourth grade, Freddy cried at everything. When Dad picked me up from my visits, he cried. I came back the next weekend, he swung open the door and cried.
They’d rented an apartment down the hill in El Cajon. Mom said she still wanted to be close to me while my brother finished up junior high, started high school.
“Bullshit,” Dad had said. “Just a way for her to keep tabs.”
Freddy would hug me tight around the neck when I came in, kiss my ear hole with a loud echoed smack, then say, “You miss your old Freddy Bear?”
What I called him when I first started talking.
The reporter was interviewing some old woman who clutched a wet cat in her arms, pressed a knuckle at the corner of each of her eyes. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. The camera switched to a live shot of the fire about to jump a road somewhere in Escondido. Flames stitching low off the asphalt. Then back to the old lady again. The reporter put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder and the woman cried harder.
“Get over it,” I said, and took a drink. Held the liquor in my mouth until it stopped burning.
Freddy pushed himself up from the couch. Picked up his glass and drained it to the ice. Dropped it to the carpet and clenched the bottle under his arm. He walked through the kitchen and stood in front of the sliding glass door.
“Go easy,” I said. “He hasn’t seen you in a long time.”
Taking a deep breath, Freddy twisted the cap off the vodka and set it sideways on the counter, let it pool and spread across the vinyl tile. He brought my lighter out from his pocket and lit it.
“What’re you doing?” I said, and a jagged line of blue flame spread across the floor.
He slid the door open. Steam clouded into the kitchen. I sat on the edge of the couch cushions and set my drink down. The people in the jacuzzi turned around, the women fixed their wet hair, the men sucked down their beers and hung their arms over the sides. Dad faced Freddy and his eyes popped open. He smiled and said something about how different Freddy looked, almost like a real man.
Dad spread his arms and took a few steps toward Freddy.
“Shit,” he said, motioning him closer with his fingers. “Can’t your old man get a hug?”
His pubic hair a dark patch against his pale skin.
Freddy stepped out on the patio. He lifted the back of his shirt, pulled a gun from his waistline. Before Dad dropped his hands, Freddy brought the gun up and shot through one of them. A blast that startled me to my feet.
Someone screamed, and people toppled over the sides of the jacuzzi. Crouched, bear crawled, then sprinted naked through the ice plant in the backyard and disappeared around the side of the house. Tires squealing, engines accelerating. Several more shots, I couldn’t tell if they hit anything.
I ran to the back door, saw Dad wriggling in the fetal position on the wet concrete. Blood spray painted over his skin, dripping from him in thin ribbons. His hand clenched tight to his chest as if he was cold.
“What the hell?” I said.
Freddy turned around, his mouth loose and open, eyes half closed. He reached into his pants pockets and fingered more bullets into the chamber of the gun. I grabbed for the handle on the door, but stepped back as the flames on the tile rose.

Smoke swirls and Freddy coughs, drops his head and hacks. Rubs the back of his eyes with his free hand and pulls the gun away from my face. He circles the coffee table and knocks the side of the gun off his head. Punches the walls, the entertainment center.
“Why didn’t you leave?” he says, and hits himself with the gun again. “Stupid.”
Dad yanks me backwards, and I almost trip over him. I stand him up by the armpits, try and carry him to my bedroom. He slips away and I bear hug him before he falls to the floor. He’s heavier than me, and we spin together in an awkward dance. I straighten him and he clutches me, rests his forehead on my chest, blood prints all over my sweatshirt.
“Michael,” he says. “Michael.”
I squeeze the back of his neck, his eyes pinched, fluttering. His head bobs.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s okay.”
Something pops in the kitchen, shatters. The flames are burning through the cabinets and one of them falls off the wall and breaks in two over the tile.
“Stupid,” Freddy says. “Stupid.”
He stops and checks the chamber of the gun, parts the blinds on the living room window. Rolls phlegm through his throat, spits to the carpet, and stands with his back to us, motionless.
I balance Dad at arm’s length and his head drops.
“Wake up,” I say, and slap him across the face. His eyes flap open, and for a second he looks clear, conscious.
“Go,” I say, and nudge him down the hallway. “Run.”
Freddy looks over his shoulder, then rushes across the room.
Dad drops face flat to the carpet.
Freddy lifts the collar of his shirt over his nose and shoves my head back into the wall with the barrel of the gun. Brings it to my forehead and twists it sideways.
“Come on, Freddy,” I say. “It’s me.”
Try and say something more but smoke goes into my lungs.
“It’s me.”
Hisses of breath, like a slow leaking tire, break through Dad’s lips. Freddy steps back and the shirt slips from his face. He kicks Dad’s side.
“Shut up,” he says.
Dad doesn’t move.
“I think he’s dying,” I say.
Freddy looks down at him, places the hand holding the gun on top of his own head. Fans away the smoke with his arm and clears his throat. Looks into the backyard.
“He’ll never die.” He drops his arms to his side. “Not ever.”
The gun dangles from a few of his fingers.
“Then let him go,” I say, and reach for it. “Let him go.”
Freddy flinches and back hands me. I stumble to the wall, and he turns my head by pressing the gun to my temple. My skin feels like it’s about to break, his squinting face an arm’s length away.
“No,” I say.
Sunlight’s coming through the kitchen window and I can hear helicopters blade through the air, roars of engines and sirens, people’s voices. The curtains on the kitchen window are burnt to hanging threads, and I can see the smoke rising from the mountain behind our house, mixture of white and gray floating up toward the low cruising airplanes.
Freddy begins sobbing, lowers the gun and bends over. Wrinkles Dad’s neck with it, taps the point off the back of his head.
I choke out a cough, rub my temple. Stare at him.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say.
He stands and flattens his hand over my face. Squishes my nose, my lips. The warm smell of smoke and sweat on his skin. He sticks the gun under my chin and I tighten my jaw. Tears welt at the corners of his eyes, roll down his face in separate paths. His chin dimples, lips quiver. Low words bumble out of him.
“I have to.”
I wait for the snap of the hammer.
“I can’t shake it,” he says.
I breathe in and hold it, close my eyes and listen to the sounds the world makes when I’m not there. I open my mouth.
“It’s me, Freddy Bear.”
The gun grazes my eyelid. Parts of the gun rattle and I can feel it on and off again against my eyelashes. Freddy’s hand at my neck.
“You should’ve left when you had the chance,” he says.

I remember the first weekend I visited Mom and Freddy. Freddy had told me he just got hair down there. He pulled me into the bathroom, thumbed down the front of his shorts. Before I could shade my eyes, I saw a few curly hairs rising above the band of his underwear.
“Sick, huh?” he said.
Mom was still at work when I tried to call Dad later that day. It was the one rule she gave me, don’t call him while I visited. Ever.
Freddy ripped the receiver out of my hand and unhooked the line. Set the phone on top of the refrigerator where I couldn’t reach it.
“You can’t call him,” he said.
I started to cry, missing Dad, my room. My things.
“It’s stupid here,” I said. “You’re stupid.”
I ran into the room Freddy and I shared. Dropped face first on the inflatable mattress I slept on.
It was nighttime when I palmed the screen off the window, put on the pair of sunglasses Dad had gotten me with one of his meals at Carl’s Jr. Looking at myself in the reflection of the window, the fluorescent orange arms over my temples, wrapped behind my ears, frames that hid half my face, I thought I looked older.
I climbed onto the window sill, hung my legs out. Freddy rolled over in bed, sat up bare chested and sniffled.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
Mom was in the living room, yelling at Dad over the phone. Freddy had told her what I’d done, and she called him right away.
“Going home,” I said.
Something thumped off the wall, and I heard Mom walking around the apartment.
Freddy kicked the blankets off his legs, draped them over the side of the bed. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“Don’t.”
Footsteps came down the hallway. I slipped into the weeds surrounding the apartment complex.
The door opened and Mom leaned against the jamb, turned on the light.
She looked at Freddy, down at the empty inflatable bed. She crossed her arms over her chest, bubbled out her cheeks and glared at me.
“What’re you doing?” she said.
I shrugged my shoulders and put my arms up on the sill.
“Come back in here.”
I shook my head.
She fluttered her lips and stepped forward. The phone rang and Freddy looked at her, the two of them stared at each other. It kept ringing. Every time I thought it might stop, it rang again.
“If you want to live with him,” she said. “Fine. Just go.”
She slammed the door behind her. The phone stopped ringing, and I could hear her muffled voice sprawl on and on.
Freddy stood up and leaned his stomach against the sill. He got on his knees, eye-level.
“You can sleep in my bed,” he said. His eyes were streaked with red lightning, lashes wet and separated in bundled strands. He said crying helped put him to sleep.
“I don’t want to,” I said. “It’s no fun here.”
I pushed the glasses up my nose.
He leaned down and pressed his forehead against mine, cool with sweat, his breath mixing in with my own.
“You should stay,” he said, and placed a hand on my arm. “Dad’s no good.”
I pulled away. Freddy reached for me but I slapped his hand down. He started crying harder, saying, no, no, over and over again.
“I’m going,” I said, and stepped backwards over the weeds.
Freddy spread the tears over his face with the bend of his arm. Straightened up and stared at me. We stood that way for a long time.
Then he said, “Fine,” and motioned me away with his hands. “But Freddy Bear can’t protect you anymore.”
He shut the window and turned off the light.