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.