Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (4 page)

    
“Guess I’ll be sleeping in this truck, then, because I won’t make rent.”

    
“Got family you can go to?”

    
“Nah.”

    
“Nah, you don’t have family, or nah, you won’t go.”

    
I looked at him again.  “You writing a book?  Leave that chapter out, huh?”

    
Brad narrowed his eyes.  “Look, you know they’ll call every garage in town about you, right?”

    
I knew they did that, but I didn’t say anything.  The garages here were pretty tight, especially the dealerships.  I might be able to get a job at an off-road place, but they don’t have a lot of work and they don’t really pay much.

    
“So, if you want to sell me those tools, I’ll buy them from you.  You have a lot of stuff that I broke and never replaced.”

    
I looked at my toolbox.  When I got out and found out that no one decent would hire a
DHD
, I worked construction.  It paid pretty well in season, all under the table, and I made enough to buy these tools at a pawnshop.  When it got too cold to do construction I came here.  I would be going back to construction now.  They were hiring. I’m big, and they like big guys.

    
I didn’t want to do construction, I wanted to fix things.  I wanted to create with my hands and my mind.  I wanted to use
tools
.

    
I wanted to sleep indoors too.

    
“How much?”

    
“Four hundred.”

    
“Cost me six.”

    
“Worth two.”

    
I sighed. “Probably.  Cash?”

    
Brad had the money on him – which meant that Wayne had told Brad before me.  It didn’t surprise me; he likely had to make sure I didn’t bust up the place.  Mechanics did that, sometimes.  It also didn’t surprise me that they hadn’t let me near the cars I had started, either.  Too good a chance I would break them all for spite.

    
I would love to think that I would have, but I know better.  I would have done the same job that I always had, fixed them right so that they wouldn’t come back.  That is just my way and, quite frankly, there are worse ways to be.

    
I took his money, jumped in the truck and drove off without saying good-bye to anyone.  I hadn’t gotten close to any of the other mechanics.  As I passed Bobby’s car I saw him sneaking a sandwich that he brought from home for 3 p.m. when his appetite got to him.  He looked up at me with a mouth full of food and big round cheeks, like a hamster dressed in people clothes.

    
And I thought to myself “
Him
they want to work here”

     Rent was $150 per week, so I paid for a whole week.  Then I put another hundred in the box spring of my bed, and put the rest in my pocket.  A night out maybe wasn’t the best idea I ever had, but I’d had a bitch of a day.

     I bought myself a steak dinner downtown, and had a couple beers with it.  The waiter turned his nose up at my decision to turn down his wine recommendations, but I didn’t hear an offer from him to chip in on it, either.

     I can’t afford to drink much so the beers really hit me.  I pushed myself up from the table, paid the bill cash with a tiny tip, and stumbled out the door.  I’d driven here and I didn’t need to compound my situation with a DUI, so I decided to take a walk around the block.

     I must have still been angry about what happened that day because the people I passed tended to look in my face and then get out of my way.  I also wasn’t in much of a mood to justify myself to any of them so I just kept walking.
  The sun had set and the street lights were on.  Cold night air blew against my face; the city smells of car exhaust and open dumpsters in a restaurant district filled my nose.

    
I was passing by a parking lot when I heard someone say, “That’s pretty funny,” and then I heard a dog yelp.

     I don’t know why but that got my attention.  I looked to my left and I saw four guys standing around in a circle.

     They laughed and the dog yelped again.

     I crossed a short, wrought-iron fence and passed two lines of parked cars, and then I saw what I was hoping I wouldn’t see: four guys kicking a dog.

     Something just burned inside of me when I laid eyes on that.  Who does that?  Who the hell needs to see some animal suffer for their jollies?  I stepped past the third line of cars and called out, “Hey!” at the four guys.

     They looked up from the dog
toward me.  They were guys in their early twenties like me, better dressed than I was, probably guys who’d stopped off for a drink together after work on a Friday.

     I expected them to scatter but they didn’t.  If anything they looked as irritated with me as I was with them – as if they were saying, “Who are you to talk to us without permission?”

     “We don’t have any money for you, hobo,” one of them, a light-skinned black guy, announced.  The others chuckled.

     The dog tried to get up and one of them pushed it back down with his foot.

     “You don’t want to touch that dog again,” I said.

     One of the other guys, a white guy in a grey suit with a red tie and white shirt, his brown hair cut close to his scalp, grinned, turned, and just kicked the dog under the jaw.  It yelped, turned in a circle and whimpered.

     “The fuckin’ dog pissed on the tire of my
brand new
car,” another, also white, said. “You better take a walk, pal, or you’re going to get what
he’s
going to get.”

     You grow up on a farm, you learn to respect animals.  Even the food animals like cows and chickens and pigs – they’re going to die, but you don’t want to see them suffer. 
The life you make for yourself costs them theirs.

     But dogs are special.  A good dog guards your crop all night from the varmints that would eat it.  A dog protects you from what might come to eat your herd.  He’s your companion, he’s your friend.  He works right beside you for no other reason than because he can.

     “I’m telling you one more time to get away from that dog,” I told them.

     I started walking, they lined up between me and the dog.  It didn’t run away, and then I saw why.  They’d already broken his leg.

     I’m not ashamed to say, I lost it.  It was too much.  I’d gotten kicked out of the Navy for no damn good reason, I’d gotten fired for no good reason, now here I was going to have to work through the whole, hot summer on someone else’s property for no good reason, trading sweat for pennies, because all I ever did was to try to work for someone else and then stand up for myself. 

     No.  Not only no, but
hell
no!  I charged forward and I engaged.

     The first guy caught me in the stomach with his right.  I reached out and took him by the side of the head with my left hand, and punched him square between the eyes with my right.  Another of them leapt at me and caught me around the shoulders, trying to drive me to the ground with his weight.

     If I didn’t have fifty pounds on him, that might have worked.  As it was, I caught him in the chest with my right elbow and punched the guy coming up behind him with my left fist.  The first guy was staggering to the ground, shaking his head, when the fourth guy punched me in the head.

     The guy with his arms around my shoulders tried to drag me to the ground, circling behind me and pulling back.  The fourth guy, the black one, hit me in the stomach, then again, and again, then looked up at me and smiled, as if to say, “This is what you get, aren’t you sorry now?”

     I pasted him once in the mouth, then in the throat in a left-right combination.  He stepped back, both hands on his neck, and I could see the third guy had chosen the better part of valor and had taken off.

     I reached my right hand behind me, found the back of the second guy’s head, and then flipped him over my shoulder. 
He landed on his feet and I took him by the hair and punched him in the back of the head, right behind the ear.  He dropped like a stone.

     The dog whimpered again.  I turned and he was laying by the guy I’d punched in the throat.  For all of the pain the poor animal was in, he laid his head on that guy’s leg and his tail thumped the ground.  His broken leg lay twisted out behind him.

     The guy was making some kind of gasping noise.  I’d probably hurt him pretty badly.  The first one lay quiet on the ground, and the fourth lay next to him.  They were amateurs.  I took a step toward the dog, wondering if I had enough money to afford a vet.

     “Stop right there!” I heard behind me.  I turned and saw two uniform cops with their weapons drawn, and that third guy standing behind them.

     Great.

     “So you was defending a dog?” the big cop asked me.  He was black, overweight, dressed in over-tight pants and an over-loose jacket.  His stomach poked out three inches past his belt line and strained the last two buttons of his white shirt.  His tie looked like a test pattern and his breath proved that coffee could get rancid.

     “They were stomping it,” I said, not looking at him.

     “They said they found it that way,” the cop informed me.  “They say they were trying to get it into their car when you came up, tried to mug them.”

     “I want a lawyer,” I told him.

     “Sure,” he said.  “We’ll get you one, one is on the way, but while he gets here, let me tell you something.

     “Them boys you beat up?  One of them was a fellow officer’s
brother
.  And that punch you gave him in the neck?  Well, he died.”

     No
way!
  I didn’t hit him that hard.

     I looked up at him.  He wasn’t lying.  “I don’t want to talk to you until I hear from my lawyer.” 

     “Well, you’re poor, so you get you a prime, public defender.  And when he is through seeing his
other
thousand valued customers, I am sure he will get around to you.

     “And I bet, with all that long, blond hair, they gonna
love
you in prison, Randy Morden,
dishonorable discharge
, U.S. Navy, because it’s four against one, and they sent that dog to the pound,  so he ain’t talkin’.”

     The cop grinned again, turned around and left.  Two hours later, when the public defender, an overworked, greasy-haired white woman with coke-bottle glasses, finally arrived, she told me the exact same thing.  She may get me off with manslaughter, but the DA wanted Murder Two and odds were that I would do no less than ten years.

     And she let me know that they were putting down the dog.

    I lay in a dirty little cot, in a dirty little cell, in local lock up.  A single bulb burned above me, a stainless steel toilet ran to my right.  The whole place stank of urine and fear.

     My cellmate was a big, dark-haired, dusky weightlifter-type.  I don’t know if I could have beaten him in a fair fight
.  I resolved not to fight fair if he pressed me, but so far he just stared at me. 

     After about two hours of this, he finally said, “You dat murderin’ white boy?”

     “Why, you going to do something to make me want to kill you?”

     He put up his hands, “No, no!  I saw you on the news, man!  Say you killed a man,” he snapped his fingers, “didn’t take you
nothin’
.”