A Real Stand-Up Guy

Scattered images in the purgatory between dream and consciousness pierced my aching head as I awoke, sore and disoriented. Cow shit like smelling salts bringing me back to the land of the living.

I looked around at the wide open enclosure of what looked to be a barn. Hay piled to the rusted steel roof on all four sides. Old John Deere tractors that looked as though they hadn’t been touched in decades sitting between two old dirty work stations with saws, screwdrivers, and nails sprawled like the after-effect of a mid-west tornado.

“Where the fuck am I?” I thought. “Jesus, what happened?”

The images were still like white noise coming from a TV with barely any reception. The figures were there. So were movements. But the details weren’t clear. Christ, my head was splitting. I got up and walked like a 3 a.m drunk after being thrown out of a bar, all the way to the two large barn doors. I pushed on them. Nothing. There was a small split where sunlight creeped in. I could see what looked to be a chain on the outside. That would explain it.

Panic was sitting in my chest. I slid down the barn door and sat on the ground, trying to slow my racing heart. Trying to remember. Trying to solve the mental puzzle. With my hands in front of my eyes. My eyes closed tight, concentrating deep on my thoughts. The images began to clear like the calming of rippling water.

Me and Jack Langley sitting in his Buick, parked in the tall grass in front of the Geary’s mansion on Roseberry Hill. Both of us with ski masks on. Both of us laughing, smoking cigarettes, thinking that it was too easy. Too goddamn simple to break into this house, steal whatever valuables they had and skip town. Too good to be true. Then I remembered what my father said before the cancer took him. That when things seemed too good to be true, it’s probably because they were.

We walked out into the cool evening air, with a brilliant orange flame setting over the western hilltops of Annandale. With a rag wrapped tightly around my wrist, I broke the glass above the doorknob, reached in and unlocked it from the other side.

Inside, the house was quiet. Dark and still. Then I remembered a gunshot ringing through the graveyard silence, sounding as loud as artillery rounds deep in the jungles of Quang Tri. I turned around and saw blood trickle down Jack’s head like a scarlet constrictor before he fell back down the stairs.

Then there was the fat man. 300 pounds if he was a pound, putting my head in the crook of his arm. A head that he could have popped like a cork had he wanted to, but instead, he put a needle in my arm and dragged me off to a shiny black corvette, where he threw me in the back like a rag doll.

There was another image, like a word on the tip of a tongue. It was there, but not there. Close, yet a thousand miles away. A face. A face at the window of the car, as my consciousness slipped into the ether. My head leaned against the window, and I saw a face. His face. Yes. His face.

It was my mother’s shit head husband. Frankie Laroque. He was screaming something. His hands behind his back, before he was thrown into another car. Christ, I thought. Where was Frankie? What happened to him?

Frankie, the greasy fucking bartender at The Dollar who got my mother to elope and marry him in Vegas while high as a kite on methamphetamines. Good choice, mah. You got yourself a real stand-up guy. A real father figure.

He was screaming, “Hurt him! Hurt him! Or was it, don’t hurt him?” I don’t know.

Then I heard a rattle behind me. Someone was unlocking the chain. The door opened and Frankie was thrown to the ground. Soft ridiculing laughter could be heard before the door closed, and the chain, again, locked. The sun too bright to see any faces. Just sharp dressed shadows.

Frankie’s hands were tied behind his back, and his face was worse for wear. Like a fucking steamroller had run over it. His left eye was swollen shut, a plethora of purples and greens, and blacks swirling like a vortex. Dried blood stained his ears, nose, and lips. He was crying. “I’m sorry, Jamie. I’m so sorry. Jesus, I’m stupid. I’m so goddamned stupid.”

“What, Frank? What the hell is going on here?”

“I-I-I,” He stuttered. “I-I sold you out. Okay? I sold you out, and now we’re fucked!”

“What are you talking about, Frank? What the hell did you do?”

He was crying like a baby. This big grown man. 6 foot 3, 220 lbs, weeping like a teething newborn.

“What did you do, Frank? Tell me what you did?” I grabbed him by the scruff of his wife beater and picked him up to his feet. He wouldn’t look at me. He stared at the straw and the shit on the ground. “Look at me, Frank. LOOK AT ME!”

Finally, he listened. But his eyes took the anger right out of me. Like a punch to the gut, I knew he was telling the truth. I didn’t know what he did, but we weren’t getting out of this barn. I let him go. “I-I-I’m sorry, Jamie. They swore they wouldn’t hurt you. They swore they wouldn’t hurt me if I told em who’d been, ya know, ripping them off.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Kid. Your head’s so far up your ass, you can’t see that you ain’t as smart as you think. Young punks and their God complex”

“What? What are you talking about, Frank? Speak English.”

“You were stealing from the wrong people, son. And having your drug riddled fucking mom as your confidante wasn’t exactly an Einstein move, was it?”

He stopped for a second, then continued.

“Look kid. I was in trouble. Big trouble. Debt that I couldn’t repay in ten lifetimes that was gathering interest by the day. Your mom told me one night that you were stealing money from the same guys, and I saw an opportunity man. I saw an opportunity to give them information. To provide them with something.”

“Oh. Jesus. Oh Christ. We’re dead.”

“They swore they wouldn’t hurt you, Jamie. They’d just ask for the money back, that’s all. They might rough you up a little, but not this. And they told me my slate would be wiped clean. I’d be free. I’d be good.”

I looked at Frankie, and then the chain rattled again. The door swung open. I didn’t even look up. I just stared at the shit and dirt on the ground, knowing full-well that I’d be sleeping underneath it soon.

“Way to go, mah. You picked a real stand-up guy”