“Henry.” I rubbed my eyes, and stared down at the floor disoriented by sleep. “Henry,” the world gained resolution as I spoke. “I need you guys to keep it down. I’m trying to sleep.”
My jaw cracked in a stifled yawn that I hid behind a fist. I lowered it and looked at Henry and his friends with a smile. I figured I might catch more flies with honey than I would with vinegar.
Henry stared at me, indignant, chest puffed out, looking up from the tops of his sunglasses as if to assess me. He shook his head and snorted in disgust before he turned back to his friends.
“Henry, please. I’m asking you nicely. It’s one o’clock in the morning. People have things to do when they get up.” I was fresh off the oil fields, and loving every hour of sleep too much to let them slip away without saying a word. Plus, I had business I had to attend to in Seattle bright and early.
“Man, fuck that guy.” Ranch Dressing muttered. He smiled when he said it.
I call him Ranch Dressing because he puts it on everything when he comes over to my dad’s house and raids the kitchen. He puts Ranch Dressing on his french fries. He eats dry cereal covered in Ranch Dressing. Ranch Dressing is fourteen years old, illiterate, obstinately against learning in any form, and has committed every sexual act upon a woman known to mankind. He also has a criminal record about as long as my right arm.
“Fucking asshole.” Father of One, smirked.
Father of One knew I could hear him. He likes to push limits, that Father of One. He’s sixteen, and probably has a few plastic bags full of not quite legal substances in his backpack. It’s a shame he can’t afford diapers for his kid. But Father of One has the disadvantage in life of having no likable qualities. He brings drugs or his “friends” will find someone else who will.
“I’m trying to be nice here, guys. Let’s keep it down for the rest of the night.” As I turned to go, Ranch Dressing blew me a kiss good-bye that I pretended not to see. Lanky Meth-Head, a frog-eyed kid that stares off into space mostly, laughed the corrupt bark of a hyena watching the farts of a buzzard. It wasn’t long before Henry and Father of One join them.
I did my best to ignore them and maintained the dignified pace back to my bedroom. As I left I couldn’t help but think that my grandfather had built most of the kitchen. My no-nonsense tough as nails grandfather, who had been afraid of nothing and had loved civilization as a true lover. Those four kids were sitting in that kitchen without a thought in the world.
Some part of me was angry about that. Was furious at the sense of entitlement and the lack of empathy.
Henry was the son of my father’s latest girlfriend. As my father has never met a woman he knew for longer than an hour that he didn’t love so much he wouldn’t promise to marry her and let her kids move in on a moment’s notice, Henry lived in the room on the other side of the house. The big room. The room that used to be mine before I went away to college. The room I had turned into a grand office filled with books and sketches. It looked like a war zone now. I had found knives with burn marks on them not long ago. Henry had been doing knife hits. I don’t even do drugs and I know only complete retards do knife hits.
Henry’s room had been so beautiful before it had been Henry’s room. I had screwed two giant hasps to the door before I left for college and secured them with locks. I had met Henry before leaving, and quickly decided if I wanted all my possessions to remain where they were I needed to take matters into my own hands. My father, in a fury, had demanded I take them off the summer when I returned home.
“I can keep things safe in my own house!”
The day after I removed the hasps, Henry’s cousin stole the gold watch my grandfather left me when he died. Then Henry stole fifty dollars from out of my wallet, and was never made to apologize, although I shamed his mother into paying me back. Listening to them laugh their ugly alley way laughs, I decided I did not particularly care for Henry and his friends. I didn’t care for them one bit.
I went back in my room and thought about it for a while. I could feel it shifting inside me. That angry animal I get from my father. That vengeful barbarian whose hand never strays from his sword.
Those little shits. Those little, irredeemable nasty shits.
I had never been so alive as in those first few months when I left the oil fields. It was a feeling I believe is only known to people who have an experience so horrible that when they return from it the civilized world holds no taboos or terrors. It was the feeling, simply put, that I had stared Satan in the face, spit, and lived to tell the tale.
They were still yelling. What drifted up was mostly about “sluts,” “getting fucked up,” and “shit-head posers.” I hated those kids. These were the kinds of kids that yelled at their parents, that hit their teachers, and would be forcing judges to face the issue on whether or not to “try a minor as an adult” in just a few short years.
Against all that I had seen, endured, and beaten, what was Henry and his idiot teenage friends? I thought about that for a good half an hour before I got up and knocked on my brother’s door. By that time my face was like stone.
“Come in.”
I opened the door. Bryan sat in his plush leather chair, focused intently on his computer. He was playing soldier in “Call of Duty.”
“Brother.” I saluted, as is the way of the sons of Gary.
He looked at me. “Brother.”
“Do you still have that air soft gun you bought at Wal-Mart?” I asked. Bryan paused his game, a rare thing and one which attracted my notice.
“Yeah.” His eyes, blue like two laughing skies, regarded me. He knew this mood. This posture.
“Does it have ammo?” My only worry was that he had blown it all dicking around in the backyard.
“La Dama de Justicia is always loaded.” Bryan has given a woman’s name to every object of significance he has ever owned in his entire life.
“I need to borrow it.”
“Why?”
“For Gondor!” I announced. Between my brother and I, this is all the explanation that needs to be given. My brother and I have always shared a secret language.
“For Glory?” He stared at me, wide eyed, joyful.
I nodded.
Then he got me the gun and followed me downstairs.
To the kitchen.
“We must give them a chance.” Bryan whispered behind me, scurrying as well as a man who is six and a half feet tall can scurry. “It is the way of the Line of Eld and the Gunslingers.” Mostly he looked like one of those birds who are very good at keeping their heads still when their body is moving all about.
“Hey Henry!” I shouted, feeling not unlike Clint Eastwood. “Spell ‘couch!’” I commanded with the authority of a man who has a cock the exact dimensions of a can of Pringles. A monster cock, even.
Perhaps caught off guard by the question, Lord Henry Douchebag, Henry who thinks it’s a good idea to wear sunglasses at night in the rainiest fucking city in the United Goddamn States of A-motherufcking-merica, began to answer. Maybe it was the glory that compelled him. I could fill it pumping inside my veins. The glory Arthur felt drawing the sword from the stone.
“C-” Henry strained, as his mind was not made for human reasoning. His friends were taken aback by my sudden crazed appearance. No more talk of “sluts” and “getting fucked up” from them.
“C-O-W-T-C-H?” Henry asked after a long, silent while.
“Wrong motherfucker!” and I shot him. In the neck.
Bryan giggled.
And then I started to shoot them all, as Bryan’s laughter rose to mad howls.
“FUCK YOU!” Screamed Ranch Dressing, until I shot him in the stomach and he fell to his knees. Pussies. It didn’t even hurt that much. Hell, it didn’t even break skin at close range. But I should have known. Bullies cry the most when they get hit.
Lanky Meth-Head didn’t know what to do until I shot him a half dozen times in the chest and dropped him to the ground, crying. Father of One decided he was going to take the gun away from me, until Bryan and I pushed him back and I shot the tender parts on the back of his legs. He howled. It served him right for wearing shorts in Grays Harbor county. Henry lay sprawled on the floor, weeping, as I continued to pull the trigger over his back and legs.
It still hadn’t sunk in. His cries didn’t mean “Please! Oh God please stop!” They meant “How dare you! How dare you do this to me! I am kind of the world!” So I kept pulling the trigger until that changed.
By that time it changed to my satisfaction, I was the only person in the room who didn’t have tears in their eyes. Bryan’s laughter had long since brought forth oceans of mirth.
“I’m gonna fucking kill you!” Henry screamed. Until I shot him again.
“Shut the fuck up!” I shouted to all assembled in the kitchen. I had to keep wrangling them back in, as they kept deciding they wanted to leave. It wasn’t hard. I was in the best shape of my life. I didn’t stop until everyone was on the floor, sobbing.
I wouldn’t settle for tears alone.
I needed to see some motherfuckers choke up.
“I’m going to go to bed! Do you hear me!” They said nothing. I waived the air-soft gun until I had their full attention.
“I’m going to go to bed, and you’re going to sit down here and shut the fuck up! SHUT! THE! FUCK! UP!” If you have ever wondered how it is psychologically possible that the Mongols surrounded a village and slaughtered every living thing in it, I was the answer. And I didn’t feel bad. Not one lick.
“I’m gonna kick your ass.” Ranch Dressing tried to murmur. So I set to work on his back legs again, until he was in a fetus position begging for me to stop.
“My grandfather built most of this house with his bare hands. You will respect it! Do you hear me!”
Again there was silence.
“Don’t test me again.”
Then Bryan and I left and the silence of tears was golden.
*****
Later that night, Henry thought it would be a good idea to come into my room and do something horrible to me. I had tied a bell around the door that I had gotten in the first grade around Christmas time as a present from my teacher. Unlike Henry, I take care of my things, and when he opened the door the bell rang a series of golden notes that woke me up.
I was half-waiting for Henry anyway, so it didn’t take me long to get oriented, and the bell had startled him. I was surprised to find him alone, but then again it made sense his friends would abandon him. They must have figured it was “Henry’s house” and it was his job to get back control of it.
I shot him in the pants over his penis. A couple of times. Then I grabbed him roughly by the collar of his shirt, and dragged him downstairs. When I left him crumpled and sobbing at the bottom of the stairs, I lifted his face to mine.
“Don’t push me.” I said.
And dropped him.
