William

This story is a continuation of 'Gimmick,' which you can find in my other short stories.

   Garrett Barron Jr.—headed northbound on Oak Way. It was the blinding hour, and the sun slotted through the police car’s windows at an angle that perfectly struck Gimmick’s eyes. He felt hungover, still, but maybe it was withdrawal. Withdrawal made him sound like an alcoholic, and Gimmick had never liked the sound of that word. He didn’t quite like the sound of his own name either, and he guessed maybe that was the same sort of deal.

    They had taken Ollie—that was the man’s name—out of the room, leaving Gimmick to stir in his unimpressive silence. He didn’t remember falling asleep at any point, only taking long, slow blinks, but they must have accumulated to some sort of rest, because when he tore his eyes away from the wall and toward the window, it was bright outside. It didn’t look like dawn, but like the middle of the morning. He could imagine someone grabbing their second cup of coffee, maybe third. He could imagine the garbage truck going down his street.

    The thought of the world outside his hospital window made Gimmick feel useless, like plastic torn away from the outside of a stack of paper. He looked to the other side of the room, and the bed there was empty. Gimmick went back to staring at the wall. The sun fell on it in diagonal lines from where it peeked in through the blinds, and he watched the lines slowly slant steeper as the sun climbed the sky. He tried not to think of anything, and it did not take much effort at all.

    The doctor had stepped in to tell Gimmick that he was approved for release. She called him “Mr. Barron” when she did it, and Gimmick hadn’t thought of his own last name in so long that he thought she was calling him bleak, empty. He eventually remembered his own name, but even before then, he’d accepted the title with graceful resignation. Mr. Barren, the empty one. But you couldn’t forget the Jr. tacked on; Mr. Barren Jr., empty and small.

    “Mr. Barron?”

    “Hm?”

    The doctor told him he was being released into police custody. Gimmick nodded, and the police officer stepped in to give him the rundown. Gimmick knew him, had seen him around town at all the hotspots. He searched for the idea of embarrassment, something small and far away in his mind, and found it out of reach; the person this police officer had known was ruined and gone, so there was no good reputation for Gimmick to tarnish with his own mess. Gimmick followed instructions, nodded when he was supposed to nod, and watched his head when the officer helped him into the police car.

    Garrett Barron Jr.—headed northbound on Oak Way in a police car with the sun pouring into his eyes. It was quiet in the car, and Gimmick wished the cop would throw on the lights and sirens, blazing glory down the pavement. Going in for booking, and he still wanted to make a scene. He had ripped down this road fast enough to kill someone, but sure, make some more ruckus for me this time around, if you would, officer.

    Gimmick leaned his head back against the seat. When he came out of it enough to focus, it occurred to him that the back of his head was aching. Why hadn’t he asked that nurse for a painkiller?

    The road felt longer than Gimmick had ever thought it to be. It was like a residential road had woken up with some funny idea that it could be a highway. It was too long and too thin and people always ripped through it, residential or not. Could it really be called residential when there was only a handful of houses every half a mile or so?

    Maybe. Yeah, maybe, sure. People lived there. There had been that girl, the little girl killed in a hit-and-run, and that made people slow down for a while until everyone forgot about it. It was a long time ago, and everyone sped down that road. Just about everyone did. Maybe not everyone did it drunk, but he had been going to A.A. That was the kick of the whole thing. Maybe the cop would see that.

    The car pulled into the police station, and the cop didn’t feel the need to rough Gimmick to get him to cooperate. They booked him, took his prints and picture, and sat him in a room with a table that was built into the floor. He sat on an uncomfortable chair, and that was built into the floor, too.

    Gimmick waited. He hoped the officer wouldn’t try to bring up how they had known each other, because that was somewhere else, and Gimmick was trying to be in that bleak, empty room, figuring out what the hell was going to happen next.

    The clock on the wall was wrong. It housed a faded, red second hand that twitched each second, but refused to spring forward. It was like the dying tremors of a corpse. Perpetually, it was ten fifty-five and twenty-five seconds, even as the second hand fought to move. It had to be a form of psychological torture, surely, to keep him waiting in this dull, tan room with no way to know how long he’d been sitting in it. They would make him serve a life-sentence in that room, watching the second hand kick at its cage like an animal.

    The door opened (only two minutes later, if anyone was keeping count) and it wasn’t the same cop after all. It was someone Gimmick didn’t recognize. Senselessly, this made him feel worse. The cop set a cup of coffee down in front of Gimmick. He wrapped his hands around it and held them still, watching the heat turn his fingers red.

    “Barron?” the officer asked. Gimmick thought, again, bleak, empty, small.

    “Junior,” he finished, and the officer nodded. He was wearing some identification in a lanyard around his neck, and it said “DA” in front of M. HENDERSON. Gimmick didn’t care to understand what a DA was, so “officer” would do fine.

    Officer M. Henderson looked at Gimmick’s files for a long while, flipping back and forth between a few sheets of paper. Finally, he looked up and leaned toward Gimmick, elbows on the table, until he was uncomfortably close.

    “You had a brother? Older brother?”

    Gimmick sat back away from his cup of coffee and stared down at his red hands.

    “William.” Gimmick whispered the name like a secret, or a prayer, or some desperate mix of both. Henderson looked at him for a while longer, still uncomfortably close, and nodded. He drew in a deep breath, let it out in a sigh that sounded close to frustration, and sat back against his chair, finally giving Gimmick some space.

    “Ollie Dennis died in the hospital,” Henderson said. Gimmick swallowed the information with the aftertaste of William’s name still in his mouth, and the word that hit his stomach was “manslaughter.” It was an immutable truth, and he couldn’t imagine sitting up straight to look Henderson in the face and telling him, ‘I was on my way to A.A.’

    Gimmick nodded. They would give him twenty years, maybe longer, maybe without parole, and Gimmick would nod.

    “Ollie had a liver condition, it seems. Looks like it was closing in on him.” Henderson tapped a ballpoint pen on his file, uncapped, and ink dotted the page in little dregs. “A good man. Not a great one, no. Will was a great one.” Henderson looked up from the file and made several seconds of firm, purposeful eye contact with Gimmick. He broke away from it with a click of his tongue and leaned forward over his file folder to pull out an empty report form.

    “Now, about this DUI,” he said. “A nasty one, and you’ve got a history, so we’re gonna have to suspend your license until you can come up clean. So that’ll be Alcoholics Anonymous for you until you’re regularly riding the wagon. Objections?”

    Henderson’s uncapped ballpoint started dancing over the report form, and Gimmick did his best to read the scrawl upside-down. DUI, but no manslaughter. No mention of an Ollie Dennis anywhere on the page. Henderson talked as he wrote, telling Gimmick he’d be assigned a mentor in the A.A. program, he’d be checked on regularly, and he’d have to pass an assessment or two before he was allowed on the road again. Gimmick nodded.

    After a few small stacks of paperwork and a phone call or two, Henderson told Gimmick he was free to go. It was senseless, and Gimmick nodded. Free to go. Free to go where? To who? As what?

    Garrett Barron Jr.—headed northbound on Oak Way. He had stepped out of the police station and into another life that he hadn’t asked for and didn’t deserve. It probably should have felt like another chance, like redemption. Was it redemption to walk away from manslaughter short of nothing but a license and a car? A car that had been on its last stretch anyway? Walking to a place he had been going to anyway? Was it redemption to get clean because the state said he had to?

    Gimmick walked down that bleak, empty road, feeling small and pushing away a headache. He stepped into a church that held A.A. meetings just about all night, every night, and he waited for everyone else to get there. It wasn’t redemption, of course it wasn’t, and Gimmick didn’t care. He watched sunlight move on the walls until it disappeared completely, and he helped people pull chairs into a circle. He listened to a preamble, listened to some sort of prayer, and watched introductions go around in a circle, all of them just about the same. Eyes were on him, a room full of eyes.

    “I’m Garrett, and I’m an alcoholic. I’m here because I got a DUI,” Garrett looked down at his hands, “and I’m here for Will.”