“Do you know that guy?” Carol asked, looking into the rear view mirror of her parked station wagon.
“No, I don’t know him. He must be waiting for someone.” Charles replied, turning around to show his look to the man in the dark blue Dodge charger that had pulled up behind them.
It was one in the morning and Carol was having a great time. Charles had asked her to come out to dinner with a group of their mutual friends and she had wondered how much to make of it. As she’d put on her make up, her roomate Bernice had teased her.
“Well, well. I don’t think those eyebrows are getting on straighter honey. You look like you’re removing a kidney with that pencil.”
“I just want to look nice, that’s all.”
“You don’t have to tell me. Those heels do all the talking. I’ve got no plans to wait up, unless you want me here with a bucket of ice for you to sit on once this hunk is through with you.”
“Will you stop being gross? It’s not even a date. A bunch of us are going out. He just invited me to a group thing.”
“I don’t know who you’re trying to convince Mrs. Rugburn. Your eyes haven’t left that mirror for a second. I’ll be here with the aloe vera and the icy hot when he’s finished expanding your yoga poses for you.” And the two of them laughed.
Charles was a great guy. He’d played football on a scholarship at UCLA and moved to the bay area after graduating to take a job in software. Carol was twenty eight and becoming painfully aware of how all the good men seemed to be taken. Charles was big, he was employed and all throughout dinner he’d been impossibly charming, making it a point to sit next to her in their party of eight. They’d wound down the night kidding around with each other as their friends left one by one until it was just the two of them. She’d given him a ride back to his car, and now at one in the morning the street was oddly silent. They seemed to be the only evidence there had ever been traffic on it, until the dark blue charger pulled up behind them and just sat there, his engine idling.
“He probably just needs to use the mailbox.” Charles offered, gesturing to the postal drop box just behind them.
“Yeah. I guess we’re kind of blocking it.”
“Well you were gonna follow me out anyway right? I’ll just see you back at my place.” Charles said calmly, but as soon as he popped the handle the Dodge began to growl behind them.
Carol could tell it bothered him. She felt it as he paused for a hidden beat, discreetly muting the part of him that wanted to push back at the smack of the headlights, the surge of the engine. Already she could read him. She would know that face by name when they were trying not to yell at each other in the aisles of some IKEA two years from now. She would use it to know when he needed his space. He was already her man, the language was moving between them. All that was left now was to turn the pages. Charles got into his car and started to drive. Carol started to drive. The blue Dodge started to drive.
Carol had never been to this restaurant before and she wasn’t sure how to get to the freeway. She kept her eyes locked tightly on Charles’ tail lights, only occasionally letting them skip up to her rearview mirror to find the blue Dodge just behind her. Charles went left. She went left. The blue Dodge went left. Every turn. Every time until they were on the freeway and it had to be following her. Carol tried changing lanes and it changed with her. Terror crept across her body like a bitter frost. Only a minute ago, with Charles there, this whole thing had been a man looking for a mailbox. And now with each passing mile the unspeakable gawked at her with skeleton teeth. Now there had to be a way out.
Carol slammed on her breaks and the blue Dodge screeched to a halt in the middle of the 101. She stayed still, the back of her neck crackling like hot oil as she waited for some semi to come barreling out of the darkness and tear her to bits. Her look vaulted out of her skull like some terrible jack in the box slapping into her rearview and the blue Dodge just stood there, waiting. Carol hit the gas.
Her fucking phone was dead. Of course. Fuck! She had to catch up to Charles, find some way to make him understand what was going on. She had to push it. Eighty miles an hour. Ninety and climbing. Maybe she’d luck out for once in her life and get a ticket when she needed it. She pulled up next to Charles and her right arm shot out while she clung desperately to the wheel, like they were dangling over some gaping chasm. She found herself screaming like she’d never screamed in her life. He had to hear her. There was no other way.
“This guy is following me! He’s fucking crazy!”
But the wind gulped into her passenger side window in deafening thuds.
Charles came back at her in muted cuffs of sound. He was waving his arms, pointing at the exit. There was no time to think. Carol cut across three lanes and took it, with Charles in front of her, his tires grumbling over the divide as the asphalt whipped away beneath him and the guardrail came gushing forward. He barely made it over the median without splitting himself in half. The blue Dodge slid right in behind them, the three of them pulling into a tight little row under the overpass, settling into the same eerie calm that had just hung over them outside the restaurant, as if nothing had happened.
By the time Charles made it to her window, she was just so glad to see another face. He’d pulled her up from the ledge. It was going to be okay now.
“Is that the same guy from the mailbox?” He asked her.
“He’s been right on top of me the entire way here. I tried changing lanes. I slammed on breaks and completely stopped and he stayed with me the whole time.”
“Alright, look, just wait here. I’ll talk to him.” Charles had really nice shoulders. He just made you feel safe.
She watched as he walked back to blue Dodge like he was going to shove a parking ticket in its mouth and scamper it away. The window was down and he put both palms on the rim of the driver side door, his arms locked at the elbows, his head shaking in disbelief. Whatever the man in the blue Dodge was saying to Charles just did not compute. He scrunched his face up like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Charles raised his arms in the air and began pointing angrily towards the freeway. She couldn’t quite make out his words, but then, there was no time.
The shots popped in a broken order, like the beginning of some horrible down pour. POP…POP POP. Charles was dead before he hit the ground.
For Vince it had started in high school. He was a hellraiser, a real Raider’s fan. It was more than a team choice, it was real men letting them know what life was like on this side of the bridge. It was one thing to talk sports, but you better mind your p’s and q’s with it if you found yourself in the Raider nation. A Raiders jersey was a statement, not just about whose team you were on, but about whose game we were going to play. If you had five guys in a line, the guy in the Raiders jersey was not gonna be your first choice for a guy to start some shit with. A Forty Niner’s jersey maybe. What was he gonna do, refuse to wax his boat at you? But you go popping off in the Raider nation and you’re looking at a hard night.
The first time had been on a Sunday, the AFC championship game against the Jets. Vince and his friends had caught the game at a bar with fake IDs, which looked a lot more passable with their faces painted silver and black. The Jets were on the board first with a thirty eight yard field goal and there were a couple of New Yorker’s in the bar spouting off about it, their accents souring the air like rotten cheese.
“Are you kidding me? Thirty eight yards no problem! Sorry boys…” and he looked over to their decked out posse, lifting his shot in the air while he said it.
“…looks like you and the rest of the power rangers got dressed up for nothing.” and he knocked it back, croaking out a bunch of New York laughs like some douchebag chainsaw that just wouldn’t start.
“You’re a long way from Brooklyn boy.”
The make up came off easy in the car, and nobody went back to check to see if they’d started moving. The ID’s were fake. Nobody had really seen their faces. As long as nobody returned to the scene, it was just a couple of guys from out of town with some bad luck. From the shit they’d been talking, Vince had trouble believing this manner of death would come as a shock to anyone who knew them well. The whole thing settled over him very neatly, soaking into the meaning of his Jerry Rice jersey. Eight Oh. Uh oh.
When Rice came across the bridge and started playing for the Raiders, a red and white with the 80 on it could get you in trouble. Vince and his friends would chide at people with the wrong jersey on.
“Looks like you lost him boys!” He’d call, pinching the fabric around his own 80 and raising it up. “Losing is something you better get used to!” Nobody said shit. Not with all of them together like that, in their colors.
In their twenties they’d spotted a Forty-Niner’s bumper sticker and then pulled up next to it at a red light, his buddy’s ass hanging out the passenger side window while Vince laid on the horn. The guy didn’t know what hit him.
“The Niners suck!” His friend yelled as he chucked half the beer he’d been drinking at the driver’s side door. The guy got out of his car and Vince didn’t say a word. Nobody had to say it. They all filed out in silence like a bunch of milk men on a delivery and just beat the ever loving piss out of that guy. Left him in a pile about halfway through the next green light. He died in a crash trying to drive himself to the hospital, and the cops on the scene couldn’t tell the difference between the accident and the Raiders’ fans.
Vince didn’t kick it with his friends so much anymore, but he still got a kick out of trolling from time to time. He’d see a Niner’s bumper sticker and cut the guy off in traffic, or he’d pull up next to them, honk to get their attention and then gesture frantically like something was wrong with their car. He’d watch them scramble to figure out what was going on and bust out laughing to himself. Sometimes they didn’t even know he was on them. He’d just follow them, maybe find out where they live. If Vince and his friends ever got into it again like in the old days, your boy might just have an ace up his sleeve.
When he’d seen Carol’s vanity plate “49ERFAN” the whole thing had just clicked on for him. He got up real close, let the engine do the talking. Put a little fear of god in these red and golds. When the chase kicked up, Vince smelled the goal.
“Oh you think you’re gonna shake me?” Vince
barked out into the cab of the dodge.
“It’ll be a cold day in hell before a Niners fan gets me off their tail.”
But right away when Charles put his palms on the driver side window, Vince recognized him. It must have 2006, 2008 somewhere in there. Charles had been a draft pick for the Raiders out of UCLA. He’d accepted at first and then turned it down, to pursue his career. Vince remembered, he couldn’t believe someone would turn down an NFL contract. Think of the money. The women.
“Hey man.” Charles said brusquely. “You have been on us since the restaurant, alright. You are making my lady friend here very uncomfortable. Is there a reason you’re following us?”
“You a Niners fan?” Vince said, pointing to the vanity plate.
“What?” Charles’ face scrunched up on his head. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“The Forty Niners suck.” Vince said coolly, but it didn’t feel right. His friends weren’t here. He was talking to a defensive lineman. The words drained out of him, leaving a clammy puddle of silence between the two of them. Charles splashed right into it.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me!” Charles drew back, pointing his palms at the sky like god might reach down from above and pluck up this mistake.
“Get the fuck out of here you fucking…nincampoop!” Charles had to dig for the words. So rarely was he so beside himself that the conversation wouldn’t come. He shook his head from side to side.
“What…what do you think is happening right now? Like what are you gonna follow me back to my girfriend’s house and capture our flag? You are a grown ass man for goddsake! Just go home you fucking idiot!” Charles swept his arm towards the 101 and it seemed for a moment like the car might brush away in the wake of that massive gesture. His voice just seemed so sure. The whole of Vince’s world was punctured and deflating, its features distorting into clownish absurdity like the face on some forgotten balloon.
“What are you wait..”
The first shot hit Charles right in the heart. His body shook as the force of Vince’s snub nose .32 spilled through his insides, the freshly ribboned chambers of his heart flapping in the bloody silence of his chest. Then one to the jaw, kicking his head up at the neck. One to the shoulder. Both on the left side, spinning him to the asphalt to lay down his limbs in some hopeless jumbled mess, like a forgotten box of hangers kicked out the window.
Vince just couldn’t take it.
“Nobody talks to me like that.” he thought, but it was the last thought he had as his mind shrank away from him, into some inner shell. The more he tried to look straight at what had just happened, the less he seemed to be there at all.
This was the fourth person he’d killed. There was nothing fun about it. No buddies to high five about it, no way to tease out some pretense of self defense. He’d had the gun in his belt since he left the house. You gotta stay strapped. There’s lots of crazies out there. He tried to understand when he first knew he was going to kill someone that night, but his mind steamed out into some hot blank stillness between his ears. It felt strange. It had never quite tasted this way before.
Then Vince looked up and saw the bright streaking terror fumbling out at him from Carol’s face. She didn’t move. She just stared. And Vince stared back, his thoughts swallowing themselves, the murder bleeding out between them in a profane stillness that had no name. It lasted for five seconds. Then the charger growled on, and Vince had disappeared.
Jerry. Welcome to the team.
Princess Fantastic 