“No. No. No. Look, settle down.” Kimball studied the situation nervously. Gerry seemed terrified of his own pistol and he held it away from his body the way you would a snake or a lit match. “Gerry, you have things you can sell.” Kimball held up the set. “You have a television. Obviously, you have a gun.”
Genuine shook his head. “Television is crap. Gun is not mine.” He waved at an old Waring blender on the counter. “What is this worth?”
“Not a hundred and fifty bucks.”
With a sharp, stabbing motion, Gerry shot the blender twice at short range. The bullet pierced the glass pitcher and ricocheted off the concrete floor with a ping. Kimball ducked and covered his head, although if the bullet had been coming for him his evasive action would have been far too late. This had to stop.
He took a step forward. Gerry, his back turned, was looking for his next mechanical victim. Kimball put an arm around his shoulder. Gerry twitched but didn’t move away. Kimball reached slowly for the gun. Genuine began to weep. He surrendered the pistol and put his hands to his eyes. “Please,” Genuine sobbed. “Ple-ee-ease just give me money.”
“Gerry, no.”
Genuine turned to Kimball. His eyes appeared full of hatred. Because he had seen Gerry crying? Because Kimball had taken the gun? Between tears Genuine yelled, “You goddamn wop! You fecking dago!”
Kimball blinked at him. Wop? Dago? These were slurs from another era. Right street, wrong decade. And Kimball was a mutt bred from many ethnicities, Scotch-Irish, German, even a family rumor that would have made him one-sixteenth Sioux Indian and, if proven true, eligible for a low-interest business loan. But he wasn’t Italian at all. Genuine Gerry didn’t know the first thing about him and for some reason that made Kimball angry.
“Relax, Gerry.”
“Give me the money!” Gerry had squared himself with Kimball and was waving his taut arms beside his head. Now that he no longer had the unfamiliar pistol in his hand, he seemed less scared and more agitated. Quietly, Kimball recognized the irony in Gerry’s demands, which had become more confident and assertive now that Kimball had the gun. He also recognized the upside-down logic of his own fear, which had likewise and just as oddly become more intense.
“You’re not gong to shoot me,” Genuine said spitefully. “I know you. You’re not going to shoot me.” After one failed attempt, he lifted himself up on a gray, painted workbench and sat there, feet dangling. His tone was mocking. “Come on, Kimmy. Just a few bucks. A loan. It is nothing. Hundred bucks and I leave. No money, maybe I stay.”
Tears gone as suddenly as they came, he now smiled an unfriendly smile. A menacing smile. The unhinged smile of a dangerous buzz. Something about it made Kimball hot under his skin. This was an outrage. He had the gun now, after all, and Gerry was still threatening him. And threatening him with what exactly? This is why he preferred machines to people. Machines perform exactly as you expect them to. There’s nothing ironic about a machine. When a machine acts erratically, you find the broken link in the chain and when you fix it, the machine does just as it’s supposed to. If you wave a gun in a person’s face you never know what’s going to happen. If you wave a gun in a person’s face and you’re still more scared of him than he is of you, how do you fix that?
Kimball pointed the gun at the ceiling, just to remind Gerry it was there. “You don’t know me,” Kimball said. “How do you know me?”
“What? For years I know you. You keep my TV safe. In your shop. We are friends.”
Kimball still wondered how their relationship had become inverted. He had the gun in his hand, but he still didn’t have control. Genuine continued to threaten him. Continued to blather on. Meanwhile, the Zero-Zero progressed into its final minutes and he was missing it.
Genuine Gerry? Ungrateful Gerry, they should call him. Here he was, robbing the one fellow in the neighborhood who had been kindest to him. Kimball had never been afraid to answer his door, hadn’t become cynical about helping his neighbors, and for that he gets an addict blasting away in his shop, keeping him away from the scanner, insulting him at all hours, the waning hours of the most important day in Kimball’s otherwise uneventful life.
“I fixed your TV,” Kimball said.
“What?”
“Twice. It was broken. I fixed it.” Kimball poked the gun at the new antenna and knob, which were clearly poached from another make and model.
“I did not know,” said Genuine, but the news seemed to please him. “This what I mean. You are nice guy. I know you. Now, you give me money. I leave you alone.”
— He’s in custody. We have him in custody behind the Office Depot. He’s got blue jeans and a green shirt. First name of Jimmy.
— Ten-four.
Cops and robbers, Kimball thought. On the street, the gun represents authority and power, but only when possessed by the willing. In a gangbanger’s hands, or a cop’s, a gun has influence because bangers and cops are expected to use it. A cop is supposed to exercise restraint, of course, but a suspect will give himself up because he knows the policeman is empowered by the law to shoot him. Genuine Gerry surrendered his gun because he realized Kimball was not. If there are two people, neither of whom is willing to use the gun, then the gun is as impotent as cooked spaghetti. And so is the man holding it. A cop doesn’t have power in a roomful of cops. A cop has power over suspects. Over civilians. For you to have power, someone else must be weaker than you. And a man alone is by definition powerless.
“You don’t know me,” Kimball said, and then he did something unexpected, which was, of course, the only point of it.
He fired the gun.
Genuine Gerry yelped and fell forward onto the floor, his legs up in the air like a baby’s. He was swearing. “You shot me! You shot me! You shot me!”
Kimball watched the blood ooze from under Genuine’s hands, which were pressed tight, one on top of the other, against his thigh. Kimball knew from the scanner that if the bullet hit the right spot in the leg it could be a bad bleeder, and he watched evidence of that fact form an amoeba-shaped red pool across the painted concrete under Genuine Gerry’s body.
“Call the police! Call the ambulance! You fecking dago!”
Kimball walked to the shelf and turned up the radio.
— [Unintelligible] domestic. The neighbor just got home and said she heard a door slam inside the apartment. Ex-husband has physically abused her before.
— Ten-four.
— Let me know what you have when you get there.
“Call the ambulance! I’m dying!”
Kimball looked at an old classroom clock on the wall. It was 11:45. “Fifteen minutes.”
“What?”
“I can’t call 911 for another fifteen minutes.”
“Call them now! I am dying!” The skin on Genuine Gerry’s face had stretched itself tight across his skull. There was blood on his jeans and his hair. When he tried to close his bulging eyes, his eyelids didn’t meet.
“Fifteen minutes, Gerry.”
From the floor Genuine wailed in five-second bursts and cursed Kimball in Tajik or whatever. Kimball turned up the scanner’s volume knob another quarter-inch and as he waited for the day to expire, he reminded himself to call Jen in the morning, as promised, after he had given his statement to the police. This had been a night of revelations.
He might even ask Jen to dinner.
Arcadia
by Todd Dills
Chicago & Noble