them coming, when it might’ve done some good. You never hear what you really need to.
Mr. Dulles opened his eyes and put the oars back in the water. He made a few quick strong pulls and brought us over to the bank on the other side. He grabbed onto a tree and held the boat steady, waiting for me to get out. “C’mon,” he said. “We should get moving.”
“What just happened?” I burst.
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? The house blew up!” Whoa! Now I felt the words, my throat vibrating and the rumble in my chest.
He shrugged. “Gas main?” he offered.
“In a swamp? They blew it up!”
“Who?”
“Who? Them!!” I was pointing and yelling. Suddenly I knew I had a larynx because it hurt like hell. If I felt it now, why didn’t I before? “Shot Uncle Dave! Getting away! Now!!”
“Gregor, you don’t see things clear sometimes.”
“I’m disabled, not stupid,” I blurted. Every syllable was an explosion inside. A thought is just a spark; words need muscles flexing, tendons stretching. “And I’m Greg, not Gregor.”
“You know Gregor Samsa?” he asked with his cockeyed smile. And somehow I did.
“Cockroach guy?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s you, the cockroach guy.” And he stepped off up the hill. “C’mon-I’ll drop you at the VA.”
“Not going to the VA.” I never thought arguing with somebody was the way to make sure they’d follow you around but it seemed to be working for him. “Got to do something!”
“I will.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“They’re gone.”
“I know where they are.”
“How?”
“I know.” Before I could yell at him some more, he held up his hand. “If I do something about it, will you let me drop you at the VA?”
I nodded. I didn’t want to talk; all that came out was bad Tarzan dialogue. Cheetah-get Boy! I felt a whole lot smarter when I only heard the voice in my head.
We came up on top of the hill now, where his car was stashed in the weeds off the road-a ‘67 Camaro. I don’t remember lots about my past but I can tell I paid a lot of attention to cars. We gunned it out the back road to the highway.
“Call the cops?” I barked. Literally-the way I was forcing words, I sounded like a dog.
“Not yet,” he said. It was unnerving that none of this seemed to be throwing him-people getting shot and houses blown up. Maybe that was why he lived in a swamp and never talked to anybody.
No AC in that old car of his-didn’t look like it ever had it, but driving around in Florida with no AC in June, you might as well just stick your head in an oven.
When we got to town, he took the back way off the main drag, past corrugated warehouses, the old frame houses falling apart behind neon gardens of wildflowers ten feet deep off the street. Small town South Florida. Finally he pulled onto a sidestreet half a block from Uncle Dave’s store.
Uncle Dave had a gift shop-all of us, all the vets who lived in his house, made crafty things for the store. Once we finished them, he would stomp on them and grind them into the dirt and tell people they were from the Indian digs to the west of town. I don’t think anyone really believed him but we made some money out of the place.
“Wait here,” Mr. Dulles said. “I’ll be a few minutes.”
“Not waiting,” I said, following him out of the car. First I didn’t want to go with him; now I wasn’t letting him go without me. Both answers came from the same place, the same doubts in my mind-I just didn’t trust the man. If he was going into Dave’s store, I was going with him.
“There’s something there that Dave left for me,” he said.
“Guys that killed him. Take care of them.”
“I will.”
“Where?”
He pointed up the block.
“Coming here?”
“They’re here already,” he said, tilting his head back like he could smell them in the air. He wasn’t shifty-he was flat-out strange. “I’ve got to get what Dave left me.”
“ Mine,” I yelled now and he groaned. “I’m last guy in Dave’s house. Like next of kin.” This was like the Gettysburg Address, coming from me but I wasn’t done. “Dave said, ‘ What’s mine is yours-what’s yours is mine.’”
This was flat-out weird from the first second I heard it coming out of my mouth. I didn’t know what it meant and I didn’t really even remember Dave saying it, to tell the truth. But as soon as I finished, Mr. Dulles shot me a look with those hawkeyes of his that burned right through my skull-I mean really burned; it felt like somebody had shoved the back of my head against a skillet.
“Okay,” he puffed, “you’d better come. But you do what I tell you; don’t go improvising on your own. Got me?”
I nodded but I didn’t really mean it. He sighed and reached into his shirt pocket and fished out the paper from Uncle Dave’s desk. He unfolded it and handed it to me:
Greg:
Dulles will get you to safety if anything happens to me. Don’t worry. You worry too much. I trust him to get you where you need to be.
Dave
I was downright shaky on Mr. Dulles but I trusted Dave. “Okay,” I said and we went up the block fast. A van was parked in the alley behind the store, shiny black with smoked windows and a couple of stubby cellphone antennas popping out of the roof. Mr. Dulles stepped over to it and knelt at the rear fender, running his hands over the surface without touching, like he was worshiping it or something.
When he turned back, he said, “It’s them. There’s three of them, they have weapons, two of them are decent shots but the third one is the most dangerous because he’s out of control. No judgment. Everyone is afraid of him because he goes off for no reason.” He shook his head. “Idiots send other idiots into the field.”
I leaned over and took a close look at the fender. There was nothing written there. I ran my fingers over the thing, in case it was Braille or something. Of course, there was nothing there and he’d never really touched it anyway. I was feeling a bit dizzy.
“Okay,” he said, “when we go inside, the storage room is just off the door. You know it?”
“How do you?” I couldn’t ever remember him coming to the store.
“Just go inside and stay down. It should be over fast. Okay?”
I nodded but he could stick it. I’d been with him the whole time since the house. The killers left way before us and we never sighted anybody on the way that looked slightly like them. I had more reason to worry about him being nuts than about three or four or twenty guys waiting inside Dave’s store with guns.
I wouldn’t have been with him at all if I had anyplace else to go. Whether it was the VA or the hospital or another halfway house, with Dave gone, I didn’t have a home, I didn’t have a friend, I didn’t have any reason not to do anything anybody-even Mr. Dulles-wanted me to do.
His expression softened. He looked almost friendly for a moment. “If I tell you I know something, I know it. If you ask me how, I’ll have to lie to you-so don’t ask. You’ll go in the back room and stay down, yes?”
I hadn’t said I wouldn’t.
“Well, you said you would-but you didn’t mean it,” he answered, just like that.
