I was already up the creaking stairs, sliding past Mrs. Geiger, engaged in a game of solitaire on her desktop, and onto the second floor before Karl could finish his thought.
The growing set of Chinese New Year calendars still lined the walls as I ascended the steps to the attic. Mrs. Geiger had begun selling Mr. G’s collection of license plates and now only a select few remained, retained for sentimental value. I looked to my left and saw the little room in the corner, unchanged, as if Karl and I had been locked inside only yesterday—the one part of the attic I knew didn’t need to be searched for the gun.
Light burst through the little triangular window, illuminating a chest that looked like it belonged on the bottom of the ocean. I click-clacked it open, and before me, nestled in a bed of a folded-up Soviet flag, lay the Makarov.
I picked it up and held it in my hand like the Holy Grail. It was smaller and lighter than I had imagined. I held the piece out in front of me and swung around when I heard the creaking steps.
Karl stood at the top of the steps in my sights, and although the gun wasn’t loaded and likely hadn’t been fired in half a century, he naturally put his arms in the air.
“Vic, what are you doing?”
“I need this, Karl.”
“What the fuck, Vic? Need it for what?”
“I just need it. You don’t understand.”
“Well… that was my father’s. Put it back.”
I could’ve thrown him to the side and been on my way. I had started to put real muscle onto my frame, and Karl hadn’t stepped foot in the weight room in years.
“Where are the bullets?”
“Vic, that thing’s an artifact. It wouldn’t shoot even if we had bullets for it. What were you expecting would happen?”
I lowered the pistol, realizing how stupid I sounded, and caught myself flipping it around in my hand, holding the muzzle of the gun so the grip was facing out like the blade of an ax.
“Listen, my mom told me what happened to Britney. It’s disgusting, Vic. They’re… they’re fucking bitches. But you can’t go and hurt those girls.”
I pulled the pistol up to my face, still holding it at the muzzle. “I won’t hurt the girls,” I said, tossing the gun back onto the bright red folded-up flag.
I passed Karl and skipped down the steps.
“Where are you going?”
“It will all be over soon,” I called up to him.
“What? Where are you going? Vic? Vic!”
Down the attic steps, down the second-floor steps, out the side door, and I was off, sprinting at an angle across the cascading greens of the Geigers’ lush front lawn and around our brick split-level, following the stone patio as if it had a magnetic pull. I turned around the bend that led to our backyard and sprinted to the shed in the corner as if it was the end zone.
The door hadn’t been opened all winter, and it cracked as I flung it to the side. Dilapidated patio furniture was strewn and stacked throughout the shed, the legs of chairs and tables popping out from the fray like an elephant graveyard. I tore through them like the Ender of Worlds, suffering nicks and cuts on my forearms and hands—I didn’t feel a thing.
I muscled my way to the back right corner and dropped to my knees in front of a weathered wood box covered in a spider web. I wrestled it open, paying no mind to the creepy crawlers, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and pulled out its contents.
The light that poked through the wood in the sides of the shed danced on the blade of the hatchet. I held it up to my face and squeezed the dyed-red handle, crisscrossed with black tape for grip—it was my brother’s. I pulled mine out of the box next—a smaller one the color of the faded original wood—and shoved it in my belt. Papa had told us the hatchets were leftover from the Lenape that inhabited the Kittatinny Mountains before any white man had stepped foot on American soil.
I sprinted out of the shed and cleared the wire fence my father had put up to keep the deer out of his vegetable garden, hatchet in hand—I was Geronimo, King Philip, Pontiac, Sitting Bull; I was the omnipotent spirit of Crazy Horse.
My Jeep zigzagged through the lush streets of Old Short Hills as raindrops began to fall through the open sunroof. The petrichor from the sun shower transported me back to New Jersey springs when Karl and I would crack open our baseball mitts for the first time since the dormant winters, when we defeated serpents guarding the portal to Hell in the woods behind Glenwood Elementary or when we searched for the gates of Hell in the depths of the Geigers’ attic.
Pierce Stone’s yellow mammoth sat in the middle school pickup line, the music blaring so loud I could feel it in my bones—I thought I had seen Hell on Clinton Road, in the deep wood that sheltered the Klan, or in Penn Station during a weekday rush hour—and I jumped from my Jeep and crossed the parking lot: “Pierce! Pierce!” I thought I had endured Hell when I lost Maria—with a rage hotter than the deepest fires of Hell!—and everywhere I was engulfed in the suffocating flames—“Pierce!”—but none of it was true, none of it was Hell. Because when I pulled Pierce Stone out of his car and dragged him across the steaming pavement and swung that hatchet, Hell followed.
Lunchmeat
