THE SHOTGUN RULE
By
Charlie Huston
ONE
Piece of Shit Bike
It started with Andy’s piece of shit bike.
-What the fuck were you doing not locking it up?
-I just went in for a second.
-I just went it for a second. How the fuck long do you think it takes to steal a bike, dickweed?
-It was right next to the window.
-Yeah, that’ll do it, no one ever steals shit that’s next to a window. Fucking numbnuts.
George is kneeling next to a bucket of water, submerging the half-inflated inner tube from his bike’s front wheel.
He looks once at Paul, then back in the bucket.
-Don’t be such a dick, man, he lost his bike.
Paul picks up a rock from the huge pile that occupies half the driveway.
He shakes the rock around his hand like a single die.
-He didn’t lose his bike.
He tosses the rock, bouncing it off Andy’s back.
-He let someone steal it.
Andy feels pressure behind his eyes and fights it. Already cried once when coming out of the store and finding the bike gone. Can’t cry again.
He picks up a rock of his own.
-I didn’t let anyone steal it.
He throws the rock at Paul.
-It was stolen.
Paul stays right where he is, the rock skipping across the pavement and into the street without coming near him.
-Yeah, big diff.
George is still shuffling the inner tube between his hands, looking for the string of bubbles that will point to the slow leak that’s been plaguing him for days.
-Don’t throw the fucking rocks around, dad’ll have a fit.
Andy kicks at a couple rocks, nudging them back toward the pile. His and George’s dad had them shovel the rocks from the back of his pickup two weeks ago. This weekend he’ll rent a rototiller and plow up the back lawn and they’ll have to move the rocks a wheelbarrow load at a time to spread over the yard. It’s gonna suck and he’s not even going to pay them. He says they should be thanking him for plowing under the lawn that they hate mowing and weeding.
A line of bubble appears and shoots to the surface of the bucket. George covers their source with a fingertip and lifts the tube from the water.
-Hand me that rag.
Andy bends to pick up a scrap of chamois that’s lying next to the toolbox, but Paul takes a quick step and places his foot over it.
-George, don’t let this guy help with your bike. He’s bad luck. He touches your bike and it’s gone.
Andy yanks on the rag.
-Get off dickmo.
-Make me.
-Get. Off.
Andy pulls harder and Paul lifts his foot and Andy falls back on his ass.
-You’re such a feeb.
-Dick!
George holds out his hand.
-Give me the rag.
Andy throws the rag at him.
Some big brother. Think he could take his side against Paul just once. Just today. Fucking bike. Still can’t believe he was so fucking stupid not to lock it up.
George catches the rag, lifts his finger from the puncture in the tube and starts drying the rubber around it.
-Did you see who took it?
Andy gets off his ass, takes the puncture kit from the toolbox and pops the shiny tin lid from the cardboard cylinder.
-No. If I had I would have kicked their ass.
Paul reaches up, grabbing a lower branch of the maple tree alongside the driveway and chinning himself on it.
-Yeah, George, what are you thinking? If he’d seen them he would have kicked their ass. He’s such a badass ass kicker. Asses all over town are afraid of him.
Andy flips him off and hands George the top of the puncture kit.
George drops the rag, takes the lid and uses its ridged upper surface to score the rubber around the puncture.
Paul hauls himself up onto the branch, hooks his knees around it and dangles upside down, long curls falling over his face.
-Come kick my ass, Andy, I’ll just hang here and you try to kick my ass.
Andy stays where he is, watching George fix the leak, taking the lid back and handing him the metal tube of cement.
Inside he’s picturing picking up the hammer from the toolbox and swinging it at Paul’s face. He’s picturing finding whoever stole his bike and stabbing them in the throat with a screwdriver.
Paul puts one arm behind his back.
-C’mon, man, one handed and upside down, you gotta be able to kick my ass.
George rubs the cement over the puncture.
Paul puts his other arm behind him.
-No hands. No hands. It’s never gonna get easier than this, man. C’mon and take a shot. You know you want to. Remember that time I pantsed you on the quad? Here’s your chance to get back at me.
Andy remembers. First day of his freshman year, bad enough that he’d been skipped a year to start high school early, but there was Paul, greeting him by running up and yanking his hand-me-down bell bottoms to his ankles while the entire student body was crisscrossing the quad on their way to homeroom.
He pictures standing in the middle of that quad with a machine gun in his hands, pulling the trigger and turning in slow circles until he is all alone and it is quiet.
He shakes his head sharply, trying to jar the image loose, unsuccessfully.
He takes the cement back from George, caps it and drops it in the kit, chewing the inside of his cheek.
Paul swings himself back and forth a few times.
-What’s the matter, spaz? Looks like you’re getting twitchy over there. You gonna freak out and start throwing things again?
George picks up one of the rocks, cups it like a marble and flicks it at Paul, bouncing it off his forehead.
Paul laughs, drops from the branch.
Hector barrels up the driveway.
-Hey!
He skids to a stop, leaving a streak of black rubber on the pavement, his front wheel scrunching into the rock pile.
-Hey, Andy, what’s up with your bike? I just saw one of the Arroyos riding it around.
They all look at him.
Paul hawks and spits.
-Which one?
-Timo.
He sticks a finger in Hector’s face.
-You fucking sure?
Hector knocks the finger away.
-Yeah, asshole, I’m fucking sure. We may all look alike to you, but I can tell my Mexicans apart.
Paul picks up a rock, heaves it down the street.
-Fucking Timo.
.
*****
The Arroyos were legend long before George, Paul and Hector got to high school.
Fernando was the first. He spent five years at the high school, leaving behind him a shattered and exhausted administration and a faculty that was to a soul nothing but grateful that they had survived.
He had taxed the personal behavior codes to the limit, twisted them and found loopholes so obscure the entire rule book had to be revised upon his departure. And yet, despite the physical damage he had done to the campus and assorted classmates. Despite the psychological scars he had left on his teachers. Despite all this, the football coach and athletic boosters had campaigned relentlessly to have a special grading curve installed that might keep his GPA hovering just in the vicinity of a C+, just that fraction across the border from C that would have allowed him to play varsity football. Their efforts had been inspired by the havoc he had wreaked as both an offensive lineman and linebacker in jv ball.
Any opposing player unlucky enough to have to line up opposite him, any bullrushed quarterback, any running back or wide receiver required to pass through his domain on the field was inclined to trip and fall while he was still yards away rather than endure the rib-cracking-nose-breaking-concussion-inducing hits he routinely laid down. If the ball were fumbled while he was on the field, every player, his own teammates included, ran from it, terrified of the prospect of ending up in his clutches at the bottom of a pile. His heavily taped fist pounding your groin, fingers gouging at your eyes and a relentless barrage of Spanish curses regarding your mother’s pussy screamed in your ear. But, gamer though he may have been, his all but flawless record of non-attendance in class kept him from advancing to the varsity squad.
In his third junior year he had turned eighteen and passed finally into adulthood and the clutches of the criminal justice system. His record as a minor was admirable enough that his first adult arrest earned him a conviction (sentence suspended), and a final expulsion.
With Fernando gone the School Board heaved a brief sigh of relief, and then began preparing for the arrival of Ramon.
The preparations were insufficient. Ramon engaged upon his own Sherman’s March from the first day of his freshman year. Announcing his presence by egging the entire faculty parking lot at midday in full view of the sixty-eight year old campus security guard who had been phoned at home the night before and told that if he ever called the police on an Arroyo he would have a Columbian necktie the next morning. He didn’t know exactly what a Columbian necktie was, but, recognizing Fernando’s voice over the line, he knew he didn’t want one.
Ramon lasted barely one year, doing as much damage in that time as Fernando had done in one. But shortly after summer vacation began he was arrested for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. The deadly weapon being a hacksaw he wielded like a machete when a clerk at the 7/11 refused to open the register for him.
Both were long gone when George, Paul and Hector began their freshman year, but Timo was in their class making up for his brothers’ absence.
Timo seemed to have watched the progression, and decided it wasn’t for him. He played jv and varsity soccer and starred on both squads. He maintained a dead-on C+ average that never faltered, the product of a series of “tutors” who were paid to write his papers and prep cheatsheets for his tests. He was one of the school’s five letterman Mexicans.
He is also far and away the school’s biggest pot dealer. Stoners were compelled to buy his shit-brown ditch weed even when their was an abundance of green buds to be found. The penalty for not purchasing his goods being a visit from one of his older brothers.
He sported his brothers’ lowrider style. Khaki chinos, black leather shoes with white socks, long sleeve plaid shirt buttoned at the collar and wrists, but open all the way down and left untucked to reveal the white wifebeater underneath, a net over his blow-dried jet black hair, and a thin mustache he’d been cultivating since sixth grade. He wore the look, but minus the switchblade in his back pocket or the bag of reefer tucked in his sock or the Newports in his shirtfront. His lackeys carried these for him. He was always clean, ready for any patdown. A fine enough athlete that he was always welcome at the top jocks’ table. Sleepy eyed and handsome, he was watched not just by the Mexican girls, but by the white chicks as well. Cowgirls, cheerleaders, brains, jocketts all had an eye for him.
All of this concealing from the faculty what an enormous dick he was.
*****
Paul bounced on his toes.
-I’m gonna kill that fucking faggot.
George is sitting on the ground, turning his bike’s front wheel in his lap, tucking the inner tube back up inside the tire.
-Where’d you see him?
Hector is picking up tools.
-Over by their house.
-Was he fucking around or just headed home?
-He was headed toward Fernando’s pad.
George is using a screwdriver to flip the edge of the tire back inside the wheel rim. He stops.
-Fernando’s?
-Yeah.
George goes back to work.
-Shit.
Paul is on his bike.
-So fucking what, he’s going to his brother’s. I’m still gonna fucking kill him.
Hector shakes his head.
-Fine, man, go pedal over there and kill him. Not like Fernando won’t be home. Not like Ramon isn’t didn’t get out of Santa Rita last month. You see him since he got out?
-Fuck him.
-Looks like all he did in there was eat and pump iron.
He spreads his fingers wide and holds them out over his chest, showing how big Ramon has gotten.
George slips the wheel back onto his bike’s front forks.
-When’d Timo move out of his folk’s?
Hector has pulled out a nearly full pack of Marlboro Reds. He takes one for himself and hands the pack around.
-Don’t know. My sister says he got in a fight with his mom and hit her in the stomach and his dad threw him out. Like dragged him out the front door and threw him and a bunch of his shit on the lawn. So now he’s at Fernando’s.
The others are quiet as they each take a smoke from the pack.
George takes out a Bic sheathed in the stainless steel and turquoise case he bought at the Devil’s Workshop head shop last summer, and they all bum a light.
Hector takes the pack back and looks at Paul.
-And that’s all. He’s over there with his brothers. You ride over there and fuck him up, they’re gonna kill you.
Paul bites the filter of his cigarette and gets back on his bike.
-Fuck ‘em. I’ll fucking kill those faggots if they let me take ‘em one on one. Only way they can take me is if they gang up.
-Well, shit, man, that’s what they fucking do.
George packs the last of his tools away.
-Doesn’t matter what they do. We got to go over there. They got Andy’s bike.
And that’s when they look around and realize that Andy’s gone.
©Copyright 2007, 2008 by Charlie Huston. All rights reserved etc.
