Kill Switch

“Really? I do? Do I?”

“No!” Lucy shouts.

Jarrod makes a low oh-no sound and disappears into the room. Matt starts making his way toward us, smiling. Da is right behind him.

“Shut the hell up out there, I’m trying to concentrate,” the greasy man calls. I look into the room and he is lying on top of the bed, still looking out our way. And he is working it.

Even his bedspread looks made of bacon fat.

“Oh, no, you are not,” I say and stomp into his room.

The man gets to his feet, but I meet him with two hands clamped hard on his throat. I squeeze his neck and drive him backward, bouncing his head crisp off the wall.

“No,” Lucy shouts, sounding angrier. At me? How’s that work?

“This what you mean, Da?” I say as I choke the guy purple.

“It’s a start,” Da says. “Nobody messes with your nearest and dearest. That cannot happen.”

“Am I a good boy, then?”

“Eh, pretty good,” he says.

“All right, all right,” the guy rasps.

“Funny with those hands, are you, pal? Hey, Matt,” I call. “Have a seat here for a second, wouldja?”

Matt comes over and has a bulky sit-down on the man’s chest. All the wind oofs out of the guy, but he seems happy enough to be breathing. His arm dangles out to the side, and I grab it.

“This is your business hand, is that right?”

“Yes, I noticed that too,” Da says.

“Do I know what to do, Old Boy?”

“I think you do, Young Man.”

I think I do, too. I seize that disgusting paw, and I slam it flat on the squat night table. I pick up the marble cube of a night lamp, like a big, sharp-edge paperweight with a shade, and I slam it down on the hand. I slam it down on the hand. The man screams with horror as once more I slam the lamp down on his pervy, hairy hand.

With the third slam I feel the seam crack in the marble. With the forth, the seam splits completely and the man stops screaming and starts whimpering.

That’s what we wanted. You don’t always know beforehand when you want something, but you know when you get it.

As bad as I felt after smacking Jarrod around, before and after smacking Jarrod around, that is how good I feel now.

What the hell happened?

I don’t remember when I felt better about myself.

As I walk out of the room I hear Matt behind me telling the guy, “You’re going to have to pay for that lamp, Sammy.”

“Where is Lucy?” I ask Da.

He shrugs. “I think she left in the commotion.”

“Luce?” I call.

“Feel the difference?” he says, almost warmly.

I go running after her.

“It had to be done,” Da says as I run. “It had to be done, and you done it, Young Man.”

I catch up with her a hundred yards up the street, almost to her car. I put my arm around her shoulders and walk with her.

“So, have you enjoyed your big day out up here? Be planning another holiday here sometime soon? I never noticed before, but you’re kind of a trouble magnet, you know that?”

She shoves my arm away and practically out of its socket. “This place is a bucket of pus,” she snaps. “You guys should buy a house here, settle down, run for city council.”

“Hey,” I protest, “I was just up there defending your virtue.”

“My virtue does not need you. And anyway, I don’t know what you were doing, but you weren’t doing that, that’s for sure. Being your grandfather’s perverse, violent sock puppet, that’s what it looked like to me.”

She presses the button on her key ring and her car beep-beeps at us.

“You don’t understand,” I say. “It is so much more than that. It is so much more.”

She acts as if I am not even talking. She gets into the car, starts it up, revs the engine a lot more than necessary. She rolls down the window.

“I do hope you come back from this trip, Danny. I’d really love to see you again.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She sighs. “Don’t get in front of my car. Violence runs in families, you know. And I’m in the mood.”

I laugh. I jump out as she pulls from the curb.

She guns it, clips me at the hip, spinning me around and leaving me bouncing on the pavement.

11

“Valhalla.”

That is Da’s answer when I ask him where he wants to go. If he has any thoughts about where to go next, because time is the thing we have the least of, of all the things we have very little of.

Like money, strength, friends, or family support. Very little of all that, but even less of time.

“Valhalla, Da? Isn’t that in New York state?”

He smiles, like I have said something profoundly stupid.

Matt has come and gone, again. Wished us all the best, again. Said to come back, again, anytime. He wasn’t bothered by the acts of not-so-random violence going on in his tidy little cells, as there is no one on this earth with the flaps to challenge his power of unflappability.

He did, however, take just about all of my money.

“All of it?” I asked as he counted my meager stash. “Can I maybe write you a check?” I asked.

“Can I write you this?” he asked, pulling out of his pocket one of those leather covered lead deals for industrial-strength head-cracking.

“Maybe you should just post a ‘no checks accepted’ sign?”

“Nothing says ‘I mean it’ like a blackjack, though.”

Even saying that, he sounded friendly.

“I’m going to have to get one of those,” I said.

“I’m your man,” he said. “Once you have money, of course.”

So Da and I hit the street with nothing. Less than nothing, even. We are standing in this place in the clothes we wore yesterday, the only clothes we have. No phones, one wallet, mine, which serves no purpose now other than to add four ounces of artificial flesh to my bony self. A few days of medication, which is already showing signs of doing the patient little good. And the certainty that failure of a more severe kind is speeding up the highway toward us as we speak.

I get a nudge. I turn.

“Ugh, jeez, Jarrod, wash your face, at least.”

He is standing there on the sidewalk looking like a scarecrow made from strips of veal, 8-ball eyes, and lips torn off a blobfish.

“Here,” he says, holding out his car keys.

“What?”

“I screwed you up. I ruined everything. You were doing fine. You were going to win, and I blew it. Now look at you, you both look like crap, you’re out on the street and the end is near.”

“Hey, Mr. Sunshine,” I say, smiling at him.