Joe (9 page)

Chapter
Fifteen

The
Decider

Thursday
night was endless. For most of it, he sat out on the balcony of his apartment
and smoked cigarettes until his head throbbed. The plan was in motion, and
things were going well, but the waiting was nearly unbearable.

He thought about the events of his day
as he sat there, staring out at the night sky and the small wooded area behind
his apartment complex. He had picked up another tool for his mission on his way
home from school, a semi-automatic machine gun that was just small enough to
fit in his black backpack. When he touched it for the first time, his nether
regions had gone stiff and bulging. Monday could not come soon enough.

Into the quiet sounds of the night, he
laughed out loud to himself, tipping his plastic chair back and resting his
feet on the railing of the balcony. If a passerby were to see him sitting this
way, so calmly and casually, they would not see the cloud of insanity that was
floating in his mind. Hell, Danny
himself
couldn’t see it.

He was not dull, for all too often
stupidity and insanity do not walk hand in hand. He was smart enough to know
that he was angry all the time, but only sane enough to be able to grasp one emotion;
hate. The question now was would he be able to accomplish the little
embellishment to his plan, the one that he had come up with today? The question
was: Was he a smart enough psychopath to be able to teach himself how to build
bombs? Danny had no experience with the matter, but he did have the motivation
of a starving tiger.

He considered waiting a year or two to
carry out his acts. In fact, the reason he was unable to sleep tonight was
because he kept bouncing the decision around in his head. The longer Danny
waited to do his deeds, the smarter he would be and the more he would learn.
The longer he waited, the more money he could earn to fund said deeds. It was a
damn good thing that Danny couldn’t wait.

You know what it was? It was the
Glory
of it all. The entire world would hear his name. But, it was not the fame
that Danny sought. No, it was the
Fear.
When the reporters and students
and parents and teachers and all the other assholes spoke of him, they would
feel that
Fear
in the pit of their stomachs. They would try to
understand, but it would be impossible, and that which we cannot understand, we
fear. It was such a sweet word to Danny, when he thought of it, all seemed
oddly right with the world.

He truly believed that he was a Higher
Being than the rest of them, and they needed to know it. They
should
be
hiding their daughters and locking their doors. They should be cowering when he
passed by. They should be taking his orders. They should be crawling at his
feet like the insects they were. Better yet, they should all just die.

Danny laughed out loud again, and the
sounds of the night mingled with the sound of his defective soul’s glee. Then
he began humming the tune of an old Jimmy Buffet song. A glance at his digital
watch told him that it was five o’clock in the morning. Friday Morning.

Only three days left.

Chapter
Sixteen

John

“Shit,
this is due in three days,” John said, slapping the bill down on the kitchen
table.

His mother gave him a sharp look, but John
knew that she didn’t speak English well enough to know that he’d used a foul
word. His father just sat in his chair at the table and continued sipping his
hot tea. He spoke no English at all.

John switched to his native
language—Mandarin—to tell his parents that if they didn’t pay two-hundred and
eighty dollars in three days, their water would be shut off. His parents passed
a look at each other that answered his next question for him. They didn’t have
the money.

“Shit,” John repeated.

He was still missing two of the
textbooks he needed for school, and had just saved up enough money to buy them.
Now, it was a choice between the books or the water, and though it was obvious
which one he would choose, it still seriously sucked. He didn’t blame his parents,
not really. They had come here from China when he had been a baby, in hopes
that he would have a better life with more opportunities. The problem was that
both of them had been living in America for over eighteen years, and neither
had bothered to learn the language or the culture.

His parents shopped at a Chinese market,
ate at Chinese restaurants, watched Chinese movies and so on. His mother had a
job cleaning rooms in the city at a motel which was run by a Chinese man, and
his father worked as a cook at a Chinese take-out place. They had no interest
in learning English, and they had made that rather clear with their
stubbornness over the years.

This put an enormous amount of pressure
on John, and was a strong portion of the reason that he was so socially
awkward. Outside of his home, he had grown up with nearly all American people.
By the time he was out of elementary school he was better at speaking English
than Chinese. He had fallen into the culture as well.

Well, not entirely. His straight black
hair hadn’t been cut in years, and it fell all the way down his back. His
fingernails were so long that he could dig up a garden with them. He carried
rings and balls and cards in all of his pockets so that he could perform his
slight-of-hand tricks wherever he went. He didn’t make friends easily. He said
the wrong things. He wore clothes that only he thought were cool. By all
rights, John was strange. He didn’t know any other way to be, and helping his
parents had occupied most of his free time for his entire life.

It was an early Friday morning for John,
as the majority of his mornings were. He was nineteen years old now but had
never bothered with getting his driver’s license. He wouldn’t have been able to
afford a car anyhow. But, this meant that he had to take the bus to and from
UMMS five days a week to get to school, which was forty-five miles from his
home. Next semester he would try and get all of his classes on two or three
days. By bus it took him an hour and a half each way to get to the university and
back. Between that, taking care of his parents, working at the pet shop and
keeping up with homework, he was exhausted all the time.

His father told him to remember to pick
up some milk at the corner store on his way home. John sighed his frustration but
didn’t argue. Some things would just never change. His biggest dream was to get
out of here someday, to leave this place and never look back. His parents had
made college a condition of his continuing to live under their roof, and John
was beginning to wish that he had decided not to go. He wanted nothing more
than to travel from place to place, performing his tricks for people on the
street, and earning a modest living that way.

On his walk to the bus stop, John
thought back to his childhood, remembering a time when he had been taking this
very same walk to the bus stop for middle school. Even though it had happened
over six years ago, John still spared thoughts for the incident every time he
had to take this walk.

He had only been thirteen years old at the
time, but just as socially awkward as he was still was today. The details of it
all had begun to fade, and yet the effects had placed a large stepping stone in
the path that made John the way he was. It had left him bitter, and he was too
bitter to even know it.

The girl’s name was Jodie. The incident
that ended it all was finally beginning to unglue itself from his mind, but the
first time he set eyes on her would never leave him. The way her curly blond
hair stuck out from her head, as though gravity from the sky were pulling it
upward, still made him smile. The memory of her sea-green eyes reflecting the
light from the sun still made his heart flip. Her pink-and-blue flowered dress,
the small scar just above her right knee, the single dimple of her left cheek.
He remembered her so very clearly.

Jodie was the reason that he had not
taken scissors to his hair for six years. He was growing it in memory of their
love, but it had never been
theirs
, not really. It had only been his.

The girl had been sitting on her porch
as he passed by on his way to the bus stop that morning. When he saw her he
knew immediately that she was new to the neighborhood. To this day he didn’t
know where his courage to wave to her came from, but when she smiled and waved
back the hair on John’s head tingled. That’s why he had stopped cutting his
hair. At one time, a girl named Jodie had made it tingle.

Jodie was John’s first real friend, and
the two walked to and from the bus stop every day together. Jodie understood
John’s humor. She didn’t seem to mind as much as everyone else that he was
strange. She was one in million, and beautiful too.

Then the incident happened, and John
never saw Jodie again. He hadn’t heard from her in over six years, not since
that day–not until she had called him yesterday.

The two had been on their way home from
school when Jodie reached out and took John’s hand in hers. “There’s something
I want to try,” Jodie said, looking at John from underneath her golden lashes.

“Okay,” John said, his hand warm with
hers inside it, “I’m in.”

Jodie giggled. “You haven’t heard what
it is yet.”

John shrugged. “What is it?” he asked.

The two had reached the front of Jodie’s
house, on the sidewalk where they split ways every day. She glanced back at her
house and studied it for a moment, then, she turned back to John. “Close your
eyes,” she said, turning him by the shoulders so that he was facing her.

For a brief moment, a small-enough
second that he hoped she didn’t notice, all he could do was stare at her. Jodie
had become his best friend, and the reason he never missed a day of school. She
didn’t mind walking to the same off-beat rhythm that made John seem weird in
everyone else’s eyes. Jodie was innocent. They both were. They were only
thirteen.

The thing that Jodie did next remained
the single best memory in John’s mind to this day. Jodie leaned in and kissed
him.

The day wasn’t particularly beautiful.
In fact, it was a little windy outside, rays of sunshine only breaking through
the clouds at infrequent shifts. Fallen leaves floated their way down the
sidewalk, their soft scraping sound the simple soundtrack of the moment. But,
the world may as well have been coated with thick cotton, blotting out all that
there was except John and Jodie.

It wasn’t a long kiss, really just their
lips pressed together gently for a tiny moment that would last a lifetime. John
would give anything to go back to that moment, to seize it and take up quarters
in its grasp. That was the moment when everything changed for him. It was one
of his defining moments, a pillar holding up the man that John was becoming.

He remembered the angry shout that
sheared through the soft cotton momentarily falling over the world. The next
thing he remembered was Jodie being torn away from his touch. He hadn’t known
at the time that that would be the last time he touched her. He didn’t know
that it would be the last time he even saw her.

The next thing John saw was a dark flash
of light, and then searing pain cut across his face. Jodie’s father must have
been watching from a window, because he was dragging Jodie away now, having
punched John in the face and broken his nose. John had lain on the sidewalk in
agonized silence, too shocked to right himself. Jodie had screamed and cried
the entire way to the house, and that was the worst part of it. When he looked
back and thought about the incident, that part was always the toughest. John’s
parting glance of Jodie, as he slowly turned his head to the side on the hard
pavement, the blood streaming down into his mouth now flowing into his ear, had
been at a scared thirteen-year-old girl, tears racing down her face and the
wind slapping her hair. Just once, if John remembered correctly, before Jodie’s
dad slammed the door, she called out John’s name.

And that’s how he still remembered her.

For two weeks John had walked by Jodie’s
house on his way to the bus stop, never losing hope that she would come out of
that front door her dad had dragged her through, waiting anxiously to see her
golden hair and sweet smile. But, by the end of that second week, on his way
home from school, John’s world crumbled to ashes and settled at his feet.

It was a Friday. He could remember that
because he had hoped that Jodie would come outside over the weekend. He thought
things would go back to normal, because at thirteen he couldn’t see how else
things could go. But Jodie hadn’t returned to school, and he had been growing
increasingly worried about her over the last two weeks. What happened shouldn’t
have shocked him so much, but it did.

John stopped on the sidewalk in front of
Jodie’s house, the soles of his sneakers attaching themselves to the concrete
on which he stood. For a tiny moment he didn’t understand. Well, he
pretended
not to understand. He stared at the sign in the front lawn, refusing to
accept what it meant.

In front of Jodie’s small, yellow house
there was a realtor’s sign that read: FOR RENT. John actually fell to his knees
right there on the sidewalk as his brain processed the message. He looked up at
the house that had held the girl who owned his heart. The blinds and shades had
been removed from the windows. The patio furniture, an old porch swing and a
chipped, wooden chair were absent as well. The birdbath was gone. The beat-up
Chevy was gone.

Jodie was gone.

He was too young to have learned that
that is how change often worked, rapid and unexpected, and it socked him in the
gut with all the power of a first fall. John sat on his knees in front of her
house for an hour that day, just staring at it. He didn’t cry, because that was
not how he dealt with things, but staring at the cicada shell of a house filled
him with loss so deeply that he was forever changed. John never cut his hair
again. He never kissed another girl.

Six years later he sat on the bus, staring
at his hands, thinking about Jodie. He hadn’t stopped thinking about her since
her call yesterday. Over the last six years he had gotten good at forcing
thoughts of her out of his mind. He had allowed her memory to fade as much as
it would, as good as it gets. Those memories were old, though. Jodie wasn’t a
little girl anymore, and all the things he had tried so hard to forget about
her were flooding back to him and swimming like sharks in his mind.

What if she didn’t find him attractive?
What if she looked completely different from what he remembered? What if she
was married? What if, what if? Too many damn what-if’s.

He wouldn’t admit it, but he was scared
to see her. Things had changed since she had left.
He
changed when she
left.

In fact, he had changed
the moment
she left. Because that is how it works. Rapid and unexpected.

Most of us wouldn’t know it, but this is
a gift.