Turned Around

Enzo pulled the keys out of the ignition and got out of the car. His back was tight from the long drive, and he stretched languidly. He always liked it up here, it was peaceful.

He’d started out when it was still night in New York and driven for hours with just a short break for gas and a breakfast of sugary doughnuts. Now he stood on a thin dirt road with the morning light shining through a thick tree canopy. The weather had been fair for most of his journey, but it was clear that it had rained through the night here.

I better get on with it, he thought to himself.

Popping the trunk, he looked down at a wide-eyed Mr Williams, his passenger/ cargo. Grabbing him with both hands he hauled him out and deposited him on the ground. He immediately tried to get to his feet but could only half stand. He’d been in there for hours now so it be a few minutes before he could stand up straight again. He’d clearly wet himself, but Enzo didn’t judge, given the length of the journey and the circumstances that was totally understandable.

“You’re ok Mr Williams, give yourself a moment to get your legs back. I just had a stretch there and I feel much better for it”

“HEEEEEELLLPPPP!!! HELP!! SOMEBODY!!”

“That’s fine, you can do that too if it makes you feel better. Let it all out.”

Mr Williams, still somewhat hunched over, looked at Enzo with terror written all over his face. Then his eyes darted around manically as he took in his surroundings.

“There’s nobody around here for miles and miles, so don’t worry about being quiet it’s all good,” Enzo said in a reassuring tone.

Some of his colleagues, they didn’t approach these interactions in such an amiable way. They’d hit Mr Williams with the butt of their gun, they’d gag him, they’d threaten and intimidate, or worse in Enzo’s opinion they’d stay absolutely silent. Why did it have to be like that? It cost nothing to be friendly, that was Enzo’s philosophy.

Anyway, the die had already been cast, Enzo knew that and deep down whoever came out of the trunk knew as well. Whatever people think of organized crime families and their soldiers, of which Enzo was one, you don’t normally end up in this situation for a first offense. That just wouldn’t be practical or efficient. No, while this was Enzo’s first time meeting Mr Williams he knew before ending up here he’d have been threatened to pay his debts, he’d have endured property damage, then he’d have been roughed up, then he’d have been roughed up to an even greater extent, eventually he’d have been bundled into the back of a vehicle and subjected to a mock execution, that would have been the final warning. This was what happened after a final warning.

One key difference between being bundled into the trunk of a car for a real execution rather than a mock execution is how long the drive is. Enzo can tell you right now if you’re in that trunk for more than forty-five minutes you are as good as dead. They don’t drive somebody six hours for a warning. If he has any sense about him Mr Williams will have figured that out on the way up here.

So, with that being the case, where was the need to be hostile? We were way past that point.

“Well, if you’re feeling a bit better now let’s go” said Enzo nodding towards a small path heading away from the muddy road and into the woods.

Mr Williams shook his head emphatically, “If I go in there, you’re going to kill me!”

“That’s true, that’s true, I won’t lie to you Mr Williams. But if you don’t start walking, I’ll have to kill you here and then carry your body.”

Enzo lifted his jacket enough to show his gun tucked into his waistband. What little colour was in Mr Williams face disappeared. He started to stammer unintelligibly.

Enzo continued, “So how about this. We go for a stroll together into the woods on this lovely morning and that way I don’t have to carry a bleeding corpse over my shoulder, and who knows maybe you can talk your way out of this situation. I mean I doubt it, but anything’s possible. How about we do that?”

“Are those my only two options?”

“Pretty much Mr Williams. Pretty much. Come on, I know you’re a gambling man, that’s how you’ve ended up here. Let’s roll the dice one more time, eh?”

Dejectedly Mr Williams trudged into the forest with Enzo a few paces behind.

“So, Mr Williams, any Netflix recommendations?”

“Are you joking?”

“No not at all, you seem like a guy who’d have some good recos. Recos is what I call recommendations. What kind of stuff are you into? Dramas? Comedies? I love a good half hour comedy myself, but I just burn through them.”

“Listen you don’t have to do this.”

Enzo tried to ignore this, “Not that I don’t love a good prestige drama. I do, of course, but when you come home after a long day sometimes you just need something a little lighter, right?”

“Whatever you’re getting paid, I’ll pay you twice that. I’ll pay you three times!”

Enzo sighed; he’d hoped to have a more pleasant chat this morning, but it was clear Mr Williams only had one thing on his mind.

“How are you going to pay me twice what I get paid? You couldn’t pay your gambling debts! That’s the whole reason we’re here. Last year I made two hundred thousand dollars Mr Williams. Do you have four hundred thousand dollars?”

“Yes………..,” said Mr Williams but with hope more than conviction.

“No, you don’t. You have less than zero dollars man.”

Mr Williams started to whimper as they walked.

“But hey! Look on the bright side, a beautiful walk in the forest is free! So, there’s that.”

“Well, it’s a little difficult to enjoy the walk when you know it ends in your death,” spat Mr Williams.

“Well, that’s the future, isn’t it? Which for all intents and purposes doesn’t exist. I’d have thought somebody who gambled as recklessly as you must have, would be better at living in the present.”

“The future doesn’t exist. Easy for you to say.”

Enzo chuckled, “That’s true.”

The trail they were following was barely defined, overgrown on either side with only a narrow muddy route visible.

“Hey what if you just let me go! You’ll never see me again. I’ll never go back to New York. Your bosses don’t have to know.”

“Oh yeah? And where will you go live Mr Williams? You going to find seven dwarves to take you in? Nah I don’t think so. You’d be back hanging around your usual haunts in a wet week.”

“I won’t! I promise! I’ll get a new identity, start a new life.”

“Well, that’s a lovely idea. Ok, so let’s say I leave you here with just the clothes on your back. What next? How are you starting this new life? Where are you getting this new identity from? Talk me through it.”

“Well…………………..Ok so what I’d do is……………………ugh………….I’d walk to the nearest town……………….and………ugh…………….I’d……………well I’d sort of…………………..”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Up ahead, the trail opened up to reveal a dilapidated looking wooden bridge over a narrow but deep ravine. The sound of rushing water, smothered by the trees before now, seemed to be coming from everywhere all at once.

Mr Williams broke into a sudden run and sprinted towards the bridge. Enzo maintained his casual pace, unbothered. When he reached the bridge Mr Williams had clambered up on one of the rotting hand rails.

“Stay back! I’ll do it! I’ll jump!”

“Go for it, man.”

“What?!”

“Jump. You’d be doing me a favour.” Enzo peered over the handrail, “Honestly, there’s a small chance you survive the initial fall.”

“Yeah exactly!” said Mr Williams defiantly.

“But do you survive, the waterfalls and rapids downstream? Do you survive being in that water with at the very least broken legs?” Enzo grimaced at the thought and shook his head slowly, “I doubt it.”

“They’ll find my body though,” Mr Williams countered feebly.

“Maybe. But that’s no bad thing. It’ll be a bread-and-butter suicide. Depressed gambling addict, down on his luck, ends it all. Classic. Probably better for us because then you’re not even a missing person.”

Mr Williams stood looking down into the abyss.

“So how about it? We swimming or we walking?”

Mr Williams got down slowly.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” They never jump.

The pair walked onwards, deeper and deeper into the forest. Occasionally they’d come to a split in the path at which Enzo would simply say right or left and they’d carry on.

“This is hard work,” said Mr Williams, slightly out of breath.

“Think how I feel! I’ve got to walk all the way back as well!”

Mr Williams winced.

“Hey! Ok so maybe me starting a new life is unrealistic.”

“It is.”

“Right. But what about this. I’ve seen the error of my ways, I really have. This whole thing has made me look at my whole life in a new light.”

“Ha, yeah I can believe that.”

“So, what if you bring me home and I never gamble again. I put my head down and I work every day to pay your boss off.”

“Why didn’t you do that before?”

“I don’t know! I wish I had! I was sick, there was something wrong with me.”

“But not now? Now you’ve been cured, is that it?”

“Yes!! This has been a transformative experience it truly has. I never want to be here again. And think about it, this way your boss gets his money. He get’s more than his money! I’ll agree to whatever interest rate he thinks fair. Honestly, for curing me of this disease of gambling I’ll think of it as money well spent.”

“Hmm I dunno, in this business you tend to end up with a pretty low opinion of people’s ability to change.”

“But think about it. This way everyone is better off. I’m not dead, which I have to say seems pretty appealing to me! Your boss gets his money. You don’t have to kill me.”

“Oh, that’s no problem, I don’t mind killing you.”

“Ok………….but still all things being equal you’d rather not, right?”

Enzo genuinely seemed to consider the question, “I guess it might be nice to have company on the drive back, we could talk favorite Netflix documentaries.”

“Exactly!!” shouted Mr Williams excitedly. “We could talk as much Netflix recommendations as you want!”

“Recos.”

“What?”

“I call them recos.”

“Right, right, Netflix recos, my bad. So how about it?”

“Sure, I mean it all makes sense to me.”

“Amazing! So, we can go back then?”

Mr Williams stopped walking.

“Oh no, we’re not there yet, we have to keep going,” said Enzo.

“But……….but we just agreed everyone gets what they want if you don’t kill me and we go back to the city.”

“Sure, I agree but it’s not my decision, is it? That’s management’s call. I don’t have any more say than a hammer does in which nails get hammered.”

“So, nothing I can say can change this then?”

“Nothing I can think of anyway.”

Mr Williams lunged for Enzo’s gun and was immediately put in the mud by a decisive and emphatic punch to the gut.

“Sorry…..,” he spluttered through coughs as he tried to breath again.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Enzo, without the slightest trace of annoyance. “You had to try it. I know I would. Come on let’s keep going. You’ll walk it off.”

They walked in silence for some time, the sun in the sky indicated it was no longer morning.

“Hey, I never got your name.”

“Enzo.”

“Well, I wish I could say it was nice to meet you Enzo.”

They both laughed lightly.

“What did you want to be when you were younger Enzo?”

“I wanted to be a baseball player.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I was good too. I was always good at sports. Always had a feel for it. I loved the comradery as well, really felt I belonged. You know?”

“Yeah, that’s a good feeling. Why’d you stop?”

“Ah once I stopped going to school, that all stopped. I had to grow up, stop playing games. But hey in my current line of work I still sometimes get to swing a bat so it’s not all bad.”

“But you didn’t want to grow up to someone who hurt people did you? Baseball players they bring joy to their fans. Nobody’s scared of them.”

“Hey! I’m not some pyscho running around on the street attacking people at random. This is just a job. The people I hurt, more often than not, they had it coming to them. Anyway, it’s not personal.”

“Well, it feels pretty personal to me.”

“Listen man, you think if I was in the majors bringing ‘joy’ to people you wouldn’t be here in these woods? You’d still be here. Your choices led you here. I didn’t have many choices.”

“That’s not true, everyone has a choice! Once upon a time you were a little kid who just loved playing baseball. I loved playing baseball when I was a kid as well, we could have been friends. You don’t have to do this.”

“You liked baseball as well huh?”

“Yeah, I did. And my son he loves baseball as well. I’d sure like to be there to play catch with him when he’s old enough.”

Enzo looked at him with a raised eyebrow skeptically.

“What?” asked Mr Williams.

“You have a son?”

“Yeah, I have a son. Why is that so hard to believe?”

“It’s just that I’ve seen a bunch of people begging for their life and the ones with kids, I have to say they tend to bring it up a lot sooner.”

“Ok, I don’t have a son YET! But if you don’t kill me maybe I’ll have one I can play catch with!”

Enzo stopped in his tracks. He looked around like he was seeing everything for the first time.

“This isn’t right,” he said to nobody.

“What! Really??” exclaimed Mr Williams amazed that the prospect of a future hypothetical son might have been what made the breakthrough. “I mean YES!! This is what I’ve been saying. This isn’t right. You’re a good guy, I can tell. You don’t want to do this.”

“I mean how did we get here? Where did it all go wrong?” Enzo raised his hands to his head in anguish.

“Well, we don’t have to get into all that right now, I mean personally I blame parents and/ or the public school system but the important thing is I don’t blame you. It isn’t your fault Enzo.”

“This is the wrong path. We’ve got all turned around.”

“It’s absolutely the wrong path, but it’s not too late, you can change. Maybe coach baseball for disadvantaged youth or something like that?”

“No, this is literally the wrong path.”

“What?”

“This is the wrong path. We must have taken a wrong turn a while back.”

A silence hung in the air as Mr Williams came to the terrible realisation that there had been a misunderstanding.

“Ah……………I see. So, no change of heart?”

“What do you mean?”

“You haven’t decided to not kill me and change your whole life?

“Nah man, don’t know where you go that idea from. Come on we gotta head back. I think I know where we went wrong.”

Enzo walked back the way he came, Mr Williams followed.