Tunnel Vision (2 page)

TWO

Betty Martinez had officially had enough of high school. It was her junior year, but she felt more grown-up than she ever had in her life, and the new grounding handed down by her mothers all because of some stupid boy was the last straw. Betty didn’t even like Jake Norton that much. He was what she had considered one of the more interesting prospects available to her at Northview High School, but the thrill had worn off quickly, and the grounding over a few erroneous texts just added insult to injury. Now, as she pored over the Internet for research on a paper about the American women’s suffrage movement—a topic that had once seemed so cool, but now seemed as edgy as cotton candy—Betty felt more tired than she ever had in her young life.

What Betty wanted to be doing was living in the music pouring through her headphones—in this case, an album by the obscure and long-dead band
Discount
. She wanted to just fade away into the noise. Betty was five feet four and fit from her years in gymnastics, along with Andrea’s insistence that her daughter occasionally tag along for judo classes. She had purple hair that was ready for either a redye or a new color altogether, a ring in her nose and a stud in her lip, and plans for a small tattoo just below her left breast that would make going to the beach this summer a straight-up bitch if she ever got up the nerve to actually get inked.

Not that the moms were likely to notice, at least not right away. Andrea was always busy in her work as a children’s psychologist, and Ophelia was just as locked down into her gallery and her own art. Betty would much rather have their approval first, but she knew getting her mothers on board with that first of many planned tattoos was about as likely as ever getting a straight answer on who her father was.

As busy and inflexible on certain points as her moms were, Betty knew they weren’t half as bad as she liked to imagine. It would have been so easy to run away if Ophy and Andy had been anything besides wonderful, but they were wonderful, and it would have destroyed them if Betty had just disappeared into the wind like an ash escaping a fire.

Betty couldn’t help but wish for some neo-Dickensian upbringing that would allow her to hear the lyrics of her favorite bands with real understanding, instead of a bystander’s empathy. When Alison Mosshart sang to some unknown lover, “We wave sometimes to pretend that nothing is changing, but you’ve gone on and I’ve gone off to get lost and devastated,” Betty sang along, wondering when she would meet someone worth being devastated over.

Forcing her attention back to the computer, Betty perused the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia page on suffrage and sighed deeply. The subject had seemed perfect for unsettling the seemingly sexist Mr. Evans, but he’d been supportive of it from the start, and Betty knew that her attempt to be subversive had missed the mark yet again.
Why is it so damn hard to be an outsider these days?

It wasn’t the first time that Betty had caught herself enjoying this spoiled, deluded line of thinking, and she felt a pang of guilt over it, like she always did. Still, was craving a little adventure so bad? God, the best she could muster was the half-joking text from Jake that Ophelia had seen and that had set this whole ridiculous grounding machinery in motion.

“Send pix of bewbs pls.”

Betty smiled at the memory of it, but it was bittersweet. She felt trapped, just like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and all of their dowdily dressed, badass suffragette friends had been, but at least those women had done something with their lives. What had Betty done with hers? College was a lifetime away, so far off her radar it wasn’t even funny, even though her mothers kept bringing it up.

Turning from her homework to the all-but-ignored guitar on its stand in the corner of her room, Betty vowed that she was finally going to play the stupid thing this year. Betty’s heroes lived in a world of guitar, bass, and drums in cities run to the tune of a four-four beat, and she just knew that the one pure chance of escape available to her in the world would come in the form of a hastily recorded demo CD.

And yet, what was she doing about it?

Surely there could be some adventure in the two summers left before college, but there seemed to be an impossible amount of bullshit to shovel before she got to enjoy any of it, and Betty’s fear was that somehow she was going to miss out on all of it. She had two wonderful mothers, a best friend named June Derricks that she could confide anything in, and her whole life before her, but right now she was a bored high schooler confined to her room, and nothing felt worse than that.

When Ophelia called up to her that it was time for dinner, Betty scowled, grabbed her phone, and left her well-furnished cell.

Dinner was grilled chicken, asparagus, and salads of mixed greens and fruit. The moms had been experimenting on the deck with the new grill after work, and though Betty had found their early work to be a mix of raw and burnt offerings, tonight the food looked like it might be good.

Andrea walked in just as Ophelia sat down, and Betty watched her mothers exchange a kiss before Andrea set her bag on the floor and sat at the table. As Ophelia ran to fetch another plate of food from the kitchen, Andrea focused on their daughter. “How was your day?” she inquired, her voice wearing just enough ice to let her daughter know that, while she cared, she was still more than a little pissed off.

Betty’s mothers were as different in appearance and mood as two people in love could possibly be. Andrea was an ass-kicking children’s psychologist with a history of work with the Grand Rapids Police Department. She wore her hair short and dyed the same raven color it had been when she was younger. She was addicted to judo, hated liars, and didn’t trust most people. Andrea was hard from her job, but she could be sweet when she wanted to be, and she occasionally took off her thick skin.

Ophelia hailed from Greece and was fond of retelling in epic terms the story of the beginning of their love (a story that, to Betty, simply sounded like two people with similar interests had just decided to talk one day). Ophelia was much slighter than Andrea, her hair a natural gray, and her clothes and arms were almost always spattered with paint from one of her projects. Despite the seeming lack of attention to herself—or perhaps bolstered by it—Ophelia was impossibly, depressingly, unattainably beautiful. She was by far the sweeter of the two, always lending a shoulder to cry on or an ear to talk to, but Betty had been growing distrustful of what was starting to feel like the moms’ good cop/bad cop routine.

“My day was boring as usual,” said Betty. “My paper sucks.”

“I doubt that,” said Andrea as Ophelia set a plate before her, and then sat at the table at her own spot.

“What am I missing?” Ophelia asked.

“Betty was just telling me that she was bored. Now, why do you suppose that might be?”

Betty rolled her eyes as the two older women exchanged a glance and Ophelia replied, “I can hazard a guess. Betty, would you like to talk about any recently revoked privileges?”

“Not particularly,” said Betty. “Unless you just want me to say again that I’m sorry, in which case I’d love to.”

Ophelia sighed and shook her head, and Andrea said, “Not going to be that easy, I’m afraid.” Here it came again. “You showed a serious lack of judgment, Betty, and the worst part is that we know that you know better. Neither of us is even sure what to do at this point, to be honest. This behavior just doesn’t even make any sense.” Sermon apparently concluded, Andrea plucked a piece of chicken from her plate and popped it into her mouth, then smiled at Ophelia. “This is great, by the way. Did you get any calls?”

“Thank you and not yet,” said Ophelia, while Betty suppressed another eye roll. Her mothers’ jobs could be so fucking important sometimes that it was almost nauseating.

As Betty poked at her food—the chicken was, par for the course, a little dry—Ophelia said, “I’m sure we’ll get some contact soon, and even if we don’t it’s not the end of the world.”

Andrea nodded in sympathy, and Betty stared at them like they were a pair of aliens. She loved her moms deeply, but this sort of drama over nothing was enough to make her crazy. Other than the romantic risk they’d taken twenty years earlier, had the two of them ever risked anything? After all, the concern about the gallery was meaningless. Both of them knew the gap in scheduling three months in the future would work itself out, and the worst that could happen would be if they had to give a bunch of self-important artists from a private school a chance to display their crappy paintings and sculptures at one of Grand Rapids’ more prestigious galleries.

“I think the more important subject is Betty,” said Ophelia in between bites of food. “Both of us have a lot going on with work, I know, but it appears as if our daughter might need more attention from us.”

This time Betty really did roll her eyes, and when she looked back at her mothers they were staring her down. Andrea’s eyes were pinched and angry, but poor Ophelia just looked hurt. Andrea was a battler, but beating up on Ophy just felt like some sick kind of matricide. Betty blushed at the sight of her.

“I’m not trying to be an asshole, seriously,” she told them. “You guys are acting like I was really going to send that idiot a picture of my tits, and—”

“You sent him a picture of yourself in a bikini,” said Andrea coolly. “There is nothing funny about that, Betty. Sexism and gender roles aren’t going to go anywhere, at least not in our lifetimes, but there’s no need to play into stereotypes. By sending Jake that picture, even if it wasn’t exactly what he was hoping for, you’re forgetting how you were raised.”

“But—” sputtered Betty, but her response was waved off by the waving finger of Andrea.

“But nothing. You knew exactly what you were doing. We’ve discussed this, what? A thousand times? Pictures like that, texts, e-mails, they don’t go away. Everything you put out there can be used against you, make you look like some piece of street trash when you’re just a sweet little girl that got in over her head with a boy. You know better, Betty. That’s the problem, not that you talk to Jake or write him mash notes, but that you know better and that you’d be so willing to act like a person you’re not.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Betty, and then she stood and walked calmly to her room. Tears were running down her face as she hit the stairs, but making it from the dining room without crying in front of them was victory enough.

Betty wanted to yell at them, to shout that Jake had been the one who took the bikini picture in the first place, and that sending it to him had been a joke. It wasn’t a joke now, though, at least not a funny one.

God. Jake Norton.

Jake had just been something to break up the monotony a little bit, just a minor stop in the quest to find The One. Betty knew who that was—some distant boy in some faraway town who had as many dreams as she did about disappearing into a life of glory on the road. He’d love her poems, call them lyrics, and play a wicked lead guitar. Betty smiled despite the tears. Yeah, and sleeve tattoos wouldn’t hurt, either.

When Ophy brought her food up twenty minutes later, Betty was cheerful enough to hug her mother and take the plate without so much as a cross word.

THREE

The late-morning trip from the bus station to home only takes a few minutes on my bicycle, but my bike isn’t here, it’s locked up in the garage back at the house. Instead of walking I call Lou, my longtime cabbie friend, and like usual, he’s at the train station in minutes.

“Home,” I say, and Lou knows to drive me to the gas station by my house. If he’s curious about where I’ve been for the last two months he doesn’t say anything. Lou just drives, his eyes locked to the road like always.

I’m practically shaking when Lou parks, both from the pain in my side and my desire to be home, as well as the growing fear that something will have happened to the house while I was gone.

I pay Lou with money I took from Fillmore’s office, knowing as I do so that I’m lower in cash than I’ve been in years, but also knowing that Lou needs to be paid in full every single time. For all I know Lou would be OK with getting paid in installments, but I’m not going to find out. Lou is a certainty right now, and I’m a lot lower on certainties than I am on cash.

“Pick me up in an hour?”

Lou nods from the front seat. Doesn’t say a word, but I know he’ll be back, and I know he wouldn’t tell a soul about where he picks me up or drops me off.

The walk to the house goes quickly, though I do have a growing fear in my belly that the house will be inaccessible when I get there. The stuff inside is all that I have in the world and none of it was easy to come by.

My plain little house is still standing, at least. I wonder if my neighbors have noticed that no one has been coming or going for a couple of months. I live in the new suburbs—closed doors and windows, neighbors that don’t know each other—but my absence has to have been noticed by someone. And when they did see me, would it finally be the tipping point to make someone call the law about the boy with no parents?

I rub the wound in my side and the pain rushes in, forcing the bad thoughts into the well in the pit of my stomach. Lately it’s been even more crowded than usual in there.

I walk up the driveway as though it’s the simplest thing in the world, but my mind is insisting that FBI boogeymen will come flying from the bushes, looking for answers about the blood I left in the snow. No one comes, though—not the FBI, not Gary, and not a neighbor wondering where I’ve been. I walk around the house to the backyard and hop the fence, take the spare key from the biometric lockbox I keep on the patio, and then unlock the back door to the attached garage.

I sigh. All of my stuff is still where I left it. Even my bike is sitting unmolested. There are a lot of things that I’m going to need to do in the next few months, both for myself and for other people, and for the first time I feel like I might be able to actually do them.

I could cry, but I don’t. My last tears froze to my cheeks.
I’m home.

The house smells like it did when I left—there’s the acrid odor of marijuana still lingering like a skunk’s cousin. Not that the odor bothers me, of course—it’s just another cost of doing business. I still have a few bales in the basement, enough to make a quick sale, but that’s the last thing I’m worried about right now. I want to curl up in bed, dive onto the Internet, or sit on the kitchen floor and hug my fridge, but I do none of these things. Instead, I walk to the bedroom and slide a long storage container out from under my bed.

My get-out-of-town box is exactly what it sounds like, the stuff that I would need to leave and never come back, and just like the stuff in the garage, it’s undisturbed. I look over the contents quickly, and settle on a fiberglass knuckle-duster. Flexing my fingers in it feels good and makes me wish Spider was still alive so I could give it a test run and deliver the sort of death a man that evil deserves. Spider’s dead, though—Spider, his friends, and Fillmore, all little more than ash by now. A good thing, for sure, though not, I know, some magical solution to the problems of all those kids in that awful camp. Even as I sit here on my bedroom floor, they’re undoubtedly already being sorted out by the system. All I can do is try to shrug off that knowledge.

I distract myself from considering the meager stack of banded cash in the box by focusing on another interesting gadget, a little zip gun I made a few years earlier. The thing holds only a single .45 bullet, and is as likely to fail as it is to shoot, but it’s the only firearm in my arsenal and seems sufficient for the task. I’ve always stayed away from guns, but that’s another thing that’s changed since my trip north. I want to surround myself with iron of all types, but I’m not going to, not yet. Guns can attract too much attention, and the absolute last thing I need is any more of that.

I close the box and slide it under the bed, and then clear out of the room. Comfort was calling to me, my bed looking inviting as hell, but my pockets are full of hate. Rest can come later. Right now, I have work to do.

Back in front of the gas station, I sit and wait for Lou while the civilians roll back and forth in front of me on their way to lunch. Then his cab rolls up and I get in, rattling off the address of the farm where Gary and I were growing dope. Lou grunts and we’re off, my nervous energy playing games with my stomach.

As much as I’ve been relishing this moment, savoring the thought of putting my hands on Gary, I know the reality will be nothing to look back on fondly. I slide my fingers through the knuckle-duster in my pocket, flex them, and let the thing go.

Lou drops me off by the property without a word, and I hand him cash and tell him that I’ll be in touch. He grunts again, a talkative day for my cabbie, and I get to walking.

The pole barn we grew in is visible, as is the little farmhouse next to it. I have a feeling Gary will be in the barn working, and the unnatural blue light coming through the window near the ceiling and the bass thumping through the walls confirm it for me. A shiver runs down my spine as I think about what led me here, about everything that happened at the camp. The image of Sam laid out on the snow is a tough thing to shake. It’s good, though. I’m furious, madder than hell at this idiot and what he did for money. I can see Spider all over again, leading boys from the building while I sight down at him over the freezing stock of an M-14. My fingers were cold then, frozen to the trigger guard, but that didn’t keep fire out of that barrel.

I take a deep breath, and the knuckle-duster and zip gun appear in my hands as if by magic, and then I’m sliding open the door to the barn and walking in.

Rap music blares from the chest-high speakers in the corner of the room, but other than the stupid, boastful lyrics and bone-vibrating bass, the place is exactly as I remembered it. Water runs from the system of drip hoses I hung over the rows of dope, and grow lights cast a blue glow onto the plants. The pot itself is still early in the grow cycle, the clones barely more than a foot tall, but they’ll be taller than me soon enough.

There’s no sign of Gary as I make my way slowly around the plants, my hands and their contents tucked in my jacket pockets, and I’m starting to wonder if perhaps he’s in the house after all, when I smell a different odor. This pot’s on fire. Somewhere in here Gary is burning dope and relaxing while he watches my labor rise from the soil.

I round the last row of plants and there’s Gary, sitting in a folding chair with a joint pinched between a thumb and forefinger. His eyes widen as he realizes he’s not alone, and then widen further when he realizes just who it is that’s come to see him.

“Holy shit,” says Gary. “You’re back, man. That’s great, supercool.” He’s up on his feet, stretching a panicked smile over his face. “Hey, Nickel. Spider couldn’t be trusted, man, for real. He had me over a barrel, too. It’s great you got past that crazy asshole!”

I can barely hear the words as I cross the room. Gary’s busy staring a hole into a jacket lying a few feet away from him, and I know he’s got a gun in there. Gary has never seen me train, never seen me fight, never really seen me as anything more than money, but he’s about to learn all about me.

“Spider’s dead, Gary,” I say. “I shot him.”

Gary’s eyes dart to the jacket again, fight-or-flight battling with the haze of blue smoke fogging his thoughts.

“Spider’s dead, and so are a lot of other people,” I explain to him. “And you don’t get to lie to me anymore. You already did enough of that.”

“I’m not lying,” says Gary, and I can only shake my head in disgust. He’s backing away, getting closer to the coat, but the zip gun is out and my finger is on the trigger.

“Sure you’re lying,” I say. “You just told me this was all because of Spider. But if this was his idea, then why did he pay you?”

Gary doesn’t answer me, just keeps inching closer to the coat. He’s got nothing to say and we both know it. He made a deal with Spider to make me go away, and now I’m back.

Gary turns and dives to the floor for the jacket. I draw down on him as he frees a 1911 from the pocket—a classier gun than I would have expected—and I pull the trigger.

Nothing happens.

The zip gun falls from my fingers and I’m sprinting toward Gary, wishing I could try this all over and not be so cocky, use matches and gas and just forget about the money, but it’s too late for that now.

It looks like slow motion as Gary raises the pistol and measures me up through the sights.

I leap to the left as he fires, landing atop a row of marijuana plants and rolling off them, onto the cement floor. Another shot rings out, shattering a plastic pot but missing me. I’m on my feet at the sound of the gun, moving fast down the row of plants and chancing a look back over my shoulder. I get a glimpse of him standing back there with his gun, watching me and probably thinking I’m heading for the door, so I duck low and head the opposite way. Hopping the row of short plants could have tripped me up and gotten me killed, but it doesn’t. I land on my feet, sprinting as another shot echoes through the room.

“I swear to God I’ll kill you if you don’t leave!” screams Gary, but it couldn’t hold less weight. He already did kill me, and here I am, back from the dead.

The problem is the gun. I’m a moving target, and Gary is clearly not the best shot, plus he’s high right now. Not that it matters much. The closer I get the easier the shots will be, and I’ve been shot enough already for my liking.

Free of the plants now, I find myself near the back wall of the barn. Gary is doing me the favor of holding still, and I’m definitely closer to him, but the gun still stands between us like some immovable object. Gary fires again, the bullet missing me but striking the backside of the barn, letting a thin beam of light into the barn. None of that interests me however. I’m back on the path towards Gary. He’s cursing and banging on his gun with his fist. There’s something wrong with the thing, and it’s time to cash in.

Gary is trying to rack the slide on the 1911, but one of the .45 hollow points he’s loaded has gotten its brass stuck in the ejection port, and I close the distance between us just as the brass flies free. My world slows to a crawl as Gary raises the gun up, the hole at the end of it impossibly huge, and I launch to the right just as it goes off, the sound of it louder than anything in recent memory. This round doesn’t get stuck, and Gary’s readjusting his aim, but it doesn’t matter—I’m too close.

A good punch is thrown not with your hand or even your arm, but with your whole body. Watch a boxer whip a haymaker sometime, or even better, go down to Rhino’s gym and watch him. There’s a reason he dominated the mixed martial arts world before the UFC put it in your living room, and it’s not just because he grew up starving on the streets of Curitiba. Rhino throws a hook from the balls of his feet, through his pelvis, and then out his shoulder, putting his whole body together to deliver the pain. The results when Rhino does this now are electrifying, but watching his old tapes can be a squeamish experience. When Rhino hits you, soft parts bleed and hard parts bend, consciousness is unlikely, and he’s just getting started. After all, there’s a reason they call the man Rhino.

I can’t punch like my teacher, but I can hit pretty hard, and unless Rhino was cheating, he wasn’t wearing fiberglass knuckle-dusters under his gloves. My whole body vibrates, starting with my hand as the shot collides with Gary’s face, and he drops the pistol and takes a hard seat on the floor. A mist of blood hovers over the fallen pistol, and then I’m on top of him, the first punch just the beginning. Gary screams while I rain down punches. All I can think of is Sam, and that just makes me hit him harder.

I do finally take a break, while he’s still able and conscious enough to speak. In a minute or so, I know everything. The money’s gone, spent on a new car and used to pay rent here and fix his mother’s house up. He’s coming to a bit, thinking he still has a future to speak of and telling me he’s going to use this year’s crop to get rich all over again and we can go halfsies, just like before Spider came and screwed us over. I want to tell him that isn’t going to happen, that his plants look like crap and that the irrigation system I built is half-clogged with mold, but I don’t. By then Gary’s dead, and in another minute or so the barn and house are on fire, and I’m on the phone with Lou.