Old School (6 page)

***

After Korea, Harris just hadn’t been right. Some Chink with one of those burp guns had stitched him pretty good, but he’d come back from that. He was 81 now, but could still knock out 25 pushups without breaking a sweat. Somewhere, day two at Chosin, maybe day three, he’d stopped being scared. It stopped meaning anything when he’d ram another clip into the BAR and sweep it through another line of Chinese and watch the chunks fly off into the snow. It stopped meaning anything when the guy next to him got the back of his head wallpapered against the dirty ice. And when his platoon got stuck with blocking duty during the breakout, when they were down to maybe a squad, when he’d run out of clips for the BAR, and then he’d run out of clips for the Garand he picked up off a dead guy, when he was down to his last couple rounds for the .45, and when the little slant fuck in the quilted jacket had popped over the edge of the ditch and nailed him, all he felt was relief. Six months later, when they read the citation at the ceremony, how Corporal Harris, in covering the withdrawal from Chosin, had single handedly killed more than 150 Chinese at complete disregard to his own life and safety, he wondered if they understood what that meant, what you’d turned a man into when he cared more about killing others than he did about saving himself, and if it was really something you ought to give medals for.

***

Harris had reconned the kid when he’d started hanging with the droopy-drawered punks, knew they had the beat to fuck trailer down by the river. The Impala was parked around the side. Harris had the .45 in his right hand when he came in the door.

A couple Hispanics on the coach to the right, the kid and another guy, greasy hair, tattoos all down his arms, sitting at the table. The trailer was fogged with marijuana smoke. They were watching one of those stupid fight shows, guys locked in a cage mauling each other. The bags from the church were on the floor by the TV.

“I’m taking my grandson and the money you stole from the church and leaving,” Harris said. “Nothing else has to happen.”

One of the Hispanics on the coach laughed. “Fucking grampa Rambo. Shittin’ myself here homes.”

The tattooed guy at the table jumped up, an automatic in his hand, snapped off a hurried shot that smacked into the siding to Harris’s right. Harris turned calmly, raised the .45, taking his time. You got shot, you didn’t get shot, nothing you could do about that. But you could hit what you aimed at if you took your time. Tattoo fired again, closer, and Harris shot him in the middle of his chest. Tattoo flopped down, the automatic clattering on the table.

The Hispanic furthest back had a gun up now, but he’d forgotten the safety. Harris turned and shot him in the face. The other Hispanic tried to snatch up the gun and Harris shot him through the side of the chest.

The kid had picked up the automatic that tattoo had dropped on the table and was pointing it at Harris, the gun wobbling like a diving rod looking for water. Harris lowered the .45. “Put it down. We’ll take the money back. I’ll keep you out of this.”

“They were my friends,” the kid blubbered. He was crying.

“Wrong friends.”

Harris could see that the kid was going to fire, so he raised the .45, rock steady, pointing at the kid’s face.

“You get one shot,” Harris said. “Don’t miss.”

The automatic shook harder, the kid blinking through his tears, both hands clamped on it now, trying to steady it, shock on his face when it went off and ticked Harris on the outside of his left arm.

“Not good enough,” Harris said, and shot the kid through the forehead.

Better that way. He found a beer in the fridge, opened it and sat down to wait for the police.

Sheepshank

Lou DeGatano weighed his options. He felt like he had to piss. Damn diuretics. Or maybe it was the Warfarin, he couldn’t remember. Had something to do with the heart failure anyway, something about retaining liquids on account of his ticker was only pushing around about half the blood it used to, so his corpuscles weren’t delivering oxygen, they weren’t taking out the trash, crap was building up all over his body, and that was helping cells everywhere get on with the dying business, which was a business he’d getting on with himself soon enough. A few years ago that scared the shit out of him, but now he was looking forward to it a little, grab a nice chunk of oblivion where he wouldn’t feel like he had to piss all the time.

‘Cause the thing with the piss was this - he’d get to the can, and work his shriveled shlong out from inside the damn Depends after he got the front of his pants undone, which was no easy thing with the arthritis, and maybe one time in twenty he’d manage some kind of steady stream. But most times he'd get nothing or else just dribble a few drops down the front of his trousers. So he had an inside-straight shot at a little relief, but the odds were he’d haul his ass across the day room, equivalent of running a goddamn marathon for him, and he’d stand over the john, and he’d feel like he had to go, but nothing would happen, and then he’d drag his sorry ass back across the day room, another fucking marathon, and he’d flop down in his chair, and he’d still feel like he had to piss, except now the back of his shirt would be all sweaty and he’d be panting like a dog in August and one of the gray haired bitches would get up and switch the Cubs game over to fucking Martha Stewart or something and he’d be too tired to get up and flip it back, too winded to even say anything. So DeGatano figured he’d play the odds. Go ahead and stay in his chair, maybe even and relax his wiener muscle, let whatever was knocking at the door leak on out, probably just a dribble into the diapers –they could call the things whatever they wanted, but they were diapers, he had no illusions about that. If he bet wrong and full out wet himself, well fuck it. He’d wave down one of his keepers and they’d have to haul his ass upstairs and change him. So Lou sat back, relaxed his pelvic girdle, nothing. A drop, maybe two. Got a little kick out of playing it right. Hell of a thing when that was the high point of your afternoon, though.

Hey, the red head was working, Sabrina. He could see her down the hall backing somebody’s chair out of the elevator. Lou found he wasn’t real good with ages anymore, at least with anybody much under thirty. They all looked like teenagers to him. So he wasn’t sure how old she was, but he was sure he liked the way she looked in her scrubs. Nice, firm ass with just enough to it to tighten the fabric when she moved, give you a look at her lines, and her lines said she liked those g-strings the kids wore these days because nothing broke up the beautiful clean arc of her haunches. Perky tits that really stood up at attention, too. Sometimes, when she’d have to bend over and do something for him on account of Lou never stood up if he didn’t have to, just standing up doing to him what chasing a perp down an alley did to him thirty years ago, but when she’d bend over, that v-neck scrub shirt she wore would fall away and he’d get a nice, clear shot down her front. She liked funky bras – prints, loud colors. Just another one of those things that had changed, he guessed, ‘cause during that whole part of his life when he when he was getting the occasional look at a some board’s bra, back then, the bra was either white or black. And back then, it meant he had her shirt off, because women didn’t use to jog around in their underwear like they do now.

With Sabrina working the afternoon shift, Lou wished he had wet himself. Because that would mean she’d be the one taking him upstairs, undressing him, wiping him down. Not like anything was gonna happen. He hadn’t had an erection since Bush Jr.’s first term and with his ticker, there weren’t enough boner pills in the entire world to give him one now, not without blowing his heart out like somebody’d shoved an IED into one of his ventricles. Besides, she was a nice kid. Treated him good, and not in that baby-talk way either, but like an actual grown up, would ask him stuff, give him shit about the Cubs on account of she was a Sox fan. But still, he’d be laying there on his bed and this hot red head would be bent over, rubbing down his peter while he took inventory on her titties. Hard to call that a bad day. Thought for a second about telling her he’d had a little accident anyway – I mean maybe it was just a couple drops, but there was urine in his drawers. But DeGatano decided that crossed some kind of creep line he wasn’t willing to step over. Getting the sponge bath from Sabrina instead of, say, Clarence, because that’s how the schedule worked out, that was just luck of the draw, and who could help taking a peek then, right? But faking pissing his own pants just to get her hand on his dysfunctional equipment? That would make him a little more of a creep than he was willing to be.

So he watched her back out of the elevator. Fuck. It was the new guy. As soon as Sabrina parked the guy at the edge of the dayroom, the son of a bitch did what he always did – wheeled himself right in front of Lou. Backed up until he whacked Lou’s shins with the chair.

The new guy wasn’t that old, late sixties maybe, one of the nut jobs, Alzheimer’s or whatever. He wasn’t a complete head of lettuce yet, one of the guys over against the wall in the hallway, just staring, all their lights out. New guy was in and out, having his own private dialog half the time, more or less with it the other half. But DeGatano didn’t like him. The way Lou read it, these dementia guys, it was a little like drunks. The shit that came out when they lost control? That’s what they’d kept locked down in the basement their whole lives – that was the fire in their furnace. The smiley ones? Nodding at everybody? Probably been nice guys, the ones who would sneak around shoveling off other people’s walks after it snowed. The ass grabbers? Ones that couldn’t keep their mitts off the staff? They were the letches, not that DeGatano was judging anybody on that score. He figured if it was his brain shutting down on him instead of his heart, he probably be doing a little ass grabbing himself. But the flat-out mean bastards like the new guy? DeGatano knew all about them. Better than thirty years on the force busting assholes, he knew all about fucks like them.

Mess of noise coming down the hallway from the main entrance. Tuesday. Visiting day for Gladys. The gray-hairs’ grandkids were running down the hall, her forty-something bag-of-cellulite daughter trudging along after them. There was exactly one nice thing about the Sunnybrook Assisted Living Facility. It sure as hell wasn’t there was a brook – wasn’t so much as a blade of grass within a mile of the joint, and most of the time you had to guess if it was sunny, seeing as how the place was boxed in on three sides by a big-ass affordable housing project. But at least usually the place was quiet. Now, you got the Cubs up a run in the eighth, off to a strong start this year, and all of a sudden there’s a couple of nine, ten year olds bouncing around the day room, grandma egging them on, the girl going with that high-pitched squeal some of them got, goes through your head like a dentist drill, the boy ricocheting all over the room like a fucking pinball, like he racks up points for bouncing off old people, Lou trying to hear the game and all he can hear is Martha, who talks too goddamn loud ‘cause her hearing is shot, telling Gladys how cute her asshole grandkids are.

They must have come straight from school, the girl in one of those plaid Catholic school skirts and a white blouse, and the boy in his Cub Scout uniform. Little twist in DeGatano’s gut at that, some old business. Worst kind of old business. The Cub Scout bounced off the new guy, jolted his chair back into DeGatano’s leg, the new guy glaring at the kid, but something else in the old fuck’s eyes, something DeGatano didn’t like.

“Sheepshank,” the new guy said, licking his lips a little. The word bladed into DeGatano like an edged disease.

DeGatano grabbed the new guy’s chair and spun him around, a sharp pain in his chest all of a sudden like somebody’d wrapped his ribcage with barbed wire and given it a good hard tug. “What the fuck did you say?” DeGatano breathed out, trying to get his old cop voice back, getting almost nothing.

But the new guy’s eyes were all blank again, lights out.

“Sheep stank sheep stank sheep stank sheep stank.” Muttering Hank, from his chair across the room. All Hank did anymore, repeat what he heard, and he always heard wrong.

But DeGatano heard right. Sheepshank.

***

June, 1971

The kid had gone missing just before 3:00 p.m. Last week of school, first week of June, so it got dark late, and it was damn near dark now. It didn’t look like any runaway shit or some kid who’d gone off to a friend’s house and forgot to check in. No family crap that anybody’d heard, and a girl who was a class behind the kid had seen him talking to some guy in the parking lot at Schaefer’s Drugs, hippie looking dude, early twenties or thereabouts. Schaefer’s had a snack counter, kids from the school hanging out there sometimes. Girl said she seen the kid and the guy walking across the lot, like they were headed somewhere. Couple minutes later, she looks back, the kid was gone, the guy was gone, black Camero that had been there was gone. You can show ‘em all the stranger danger movies you want, but these slick kiddy fuckers, they got their ways.

This wasn’t one of those wait-a-couple-days, see-if-the-kid-turns-up deals. Had the wrong feel for that, plus the kid’s mom knew the mayor. So everybody was out with a copy of the kid’s school photo from the year before. It was Wednesday, so the kid was in his Cub Scout uniform the mom said. DeGatano was a detective, but it was all hands on deck, so he was marching a grid in Lincoln Park with a mess of patrol guys. Still lots of undergrowth back then, before they’d put in the pool and the ball diamonds and the tennis courts, so back in ’71 the park was just thirty acres or so of grass, scrub woods and brush. They’d get some hobos down along the east end sometimes, where the park butted up against the Burlington tracks. Nobody there when DeGatano worked his way down the right of way, he was just thinking it was time to get the flashlight out when he saw the silhouette.