Chapter Five: Weapon of Choice by Matthew A. Munich
Listen to the sound of my voice
Check out my new weapon, weapon of choice
Don’t be shocked by the tone of my voice
It’s the new weapon, weapon of choice
…
Be careful, we don’t know them
Be careful, we don’t know them
…
Halfway between the gutter and the stars, yeah
Halfway between the gutter and the stars, yeah
~Fatboy Slim
As
often happens when a threshold has been crossed, there was an extended
pause as Nick and Sadie stared at each other after the gun’s
report. Their eyes mirrored the squash game playing in their
minds, darting from locked death stare, to gun, to exit, to gun, to
death stare. Sadie wanted to react, but she was caught in a state
somewhere between terror and exhilaration, as she inhaled an acrid
mixture of odors: the musky aroma of adrenaline and the rotten egg
stench of gunpowder.
Nick
was the first to break the silence by laughing, moving quickly from
giggle, to chortle, to peals of uncontrollable, rib splitting gasps.
“What’s
so friggin’ funny, punk?” Sadie shouted, trying to gain her
composure, but suddenly feeling irritated and bewildered, as she
watched Nick bucking on the floor. As he did, she noticed the
quite exquisite musculature on his newly exposed belly, the perfection
of his café au lait skin, and legs fit to be licked.
Exiling
that thought and trying to maintain the rage that was slowly slipping
out of her, she shouted too loudly, “WHAT’S SO DAMNED FUNNY, JAYBIRD?!”
now befuddled as to whether to…what?. . .shoot again?. . .pummel him
with her fists?. . . jump him and…?
Nick
managed through his heaves, “Here I go, ‘bout to get my 1-2-3, and I
almost get smoked by a biddie! And a biddie from the H’boro, no
less! No doubt I’d get bumped out the Squad for that! Probably
bust a cap in me and dump my bagged ass in the bay. Just like
that guy this morning. That’s what’s so damned funny,
Hillsborough biddie.”
“Look,
I still don’t really know how you know my name, where I’m from, or what
the hell guy you’re talking about, but you’re in a truckload of
trouble, numbnuts.” (“Truckload?!,” “Numbnuts?!,” she
thought, “What the hell am I saying?”)
“Well then, look like we both in that same truck together, biddie, cuz it’s now yo’ prints on that gun you don’t use so good.”
At
that moment, her legs went slack and nausea struck her like a
bolt. It felt just like that point in a hard fought match when
you go from completely dominating your opponent, sending her to all
four corners willy-nilly in the early stanzas, and celebrating an easy
win, to those last few points towards the end of the fifth, when, the
tide having turned at some juncture you missed, you realize that you’re
about to come up short. Hotness bleeds on your face and shame
swells in your belly as you teeter on leaden legs only recently so
buoyant. Victory has slid elusively through your fingers. There
is now only one self-evident truth: you’re going to lose.
For
Sadie, this turn from the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat felt
all too familiar. Like a hellion, she had screeched out of
Hillsborough only to stumble again and again upon the Hillsborough
within. She had enjoyed her marauding years on the streets
because it was such a repudiation of her plasticine past. It had
felt so real. But even then, she feared that her hard edge was
faux, a fear that encouraged ever outrageous acts of villainy. It
was just this façade that Julian had punctured, peering into her soul
and midwifing a truer, more vital self. With this vitality came
competitive results to match. Julian ushered her through the
stage of nearly winning to arrive at that place where aggression is
licensed, and action flows easily from intention. “Bring more
Sadie! Pure Sadie! Plenty of time to hug and make up later,
but Kill! Her! Now!” he’d counsel transgressively between games as her
cornerman. No apologies for winning. No giving it away out
of some misguided guilt for your gilded upbringing. You can just
win. It was bracing, and she loved it.
But
still, in moments like these, one down to this punk she had just quite
literally topped, she felt the return of the past. Part of that
past included the Hillsborough Yacht Club junior girls’ tennis
“league,” where the mothers wouldn’t let the pro set up a ladder,
forcing rules such as: no winners and losers, prizes for everyone, hugs
on the game change, and no colored trim marring the all-white
skirts. Meanwhile, they ingested vodka martinis and valiums on
the club’s veranda, bragged about their husbands’ genius for stock
“speculation,” and pretended not to want their own daughters to
massacre the others and reveal to the world a superiority that they
hoped had been bred in the bone. Sadie remembers with crystal
clarity the day, aged 12, when the curtain came down on all of
that. During one game change, just as Madison Hingham was leaning
in for the ceremonial hug, “Maddy” recoiled her neck, opened her mouth,
and there, resting on her perfectly pink tongue were three little white
pills etched with ‘v’s. After that, purse pilfering, pill heists,
and bunking curfew were just the beginning of Sadie’s middle-fingered
salute to Hillsborough.
“So,
punk, why do your parents let you out this late? Aren’t they
going to be worried?” She flailed, trying vainly to retake the T in
this tussle.
“Parents?!
Shit, what a dumb-ass H’boro question! Only parents I got are the
crack whores and drag queens on the streets of the Tenderloin.
They the only ones that give me anything: food from the dumpsters, and
a ‘hey, sweet Nicky-boy, how you doin’?’ Dexie Rae the only woman
who hugged me close, an’ her titties ain’t even real! Squad now
closest thing I got to family. We got no curfew like they do in
the H’boro.” A dying boast to the right wall.
“Nick?!
Not much of a name for a gang banger,” she retorted, barely scraping up
the ball with a soft, high defensive lob, though retrieving his
Hillsborough drops was tapping her stamina.
“Back
at my old boxing gym, Dundee call me ‘Nike’. Not after the shoe,
but after some goddess or some shit. It mean “victory.”
Squad boys also call me ‘Nike’.” A definitive rail to dying
length.
“You
used to box?” Sadie said, lowering the gun and sitting on the
floor. She figured she lost game one and had ninety seconds to
regroup.
“Man,
you never met a mofo like my trainer Dundee. One righteous
dude. Always talking ‘bout bettering yourself, and empowerment,
and being above the level everybody pointing you toward. Dundee
hit you with that tongue, your ass stayed hit. He just look
straight through you, you and all your bullshit.”
“Actually, I am quite familiar with the type. Why’d you leave the gym?”
“Well,
I loved the training, but I lost a bout I shoulda never lost and…well…I
guess I just left. And like they say, Squad’s always there to nab
a recruit.”
“You know, I could ask the pro here if he’d let you…”
Just
then, she heard the unmistakable click of the club’s front door
opening, giving her just enough time to stuff the gun in Nick’s bag and
concoct another story for Julian and Bethany, both already well
hardened to her fictions.
