The Last Call

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

My normal tendency is to go into a state of black despair when I lose someone whom I consider to be close. But I wasn’t depressed. I was angry, but who could I blame? I had known all along that something was going to happen, and that it would be something that I wouldn’t like.

It was simple anger. Deep inside of me, beneath the caldera of my exterior, there was a magma chamber burning hot. If I got just the wrong jolt at just the wrong time, whoever got in my way might have gotten hurt.

Once somebody did get hurt. It never made the papers or the seven o’clock news. I was never arrested, although technically, I could have been.

When I was seventeen I met my first enemy in life. I was a junior in high school and this other kid-if you want to call age twenty “kiddish”-thought I was scrawny and even-tempered enough to be his whipping boy. His name was Jose Rios. He’d been held back more times than Carter had little liver pills. I never forgot him. The teachers tended to turn a blind eye when he’d shove some kid in the hallway and spill his books. Jose had one of those chilling laughs, the kind one could imagine a kid with a sick sense of humor might have who liked to torture small animals just to hear them squeal in terror and pain. Jose was like that in the head department. Twisted.

Whenever he picked on anybody it was a lot like a cliche vaudeville act. First came the push. Second, books or furniture would spill, making a loud clatter. Third, heads would begin turning toward the source of the clamor. Fourth: silence. Last came Jose’s evil laugh. No drum roll. Just a perverted cacophonous titter turning into a belly-rolling laugh. Every time I saw it happen I got a little upset about it, sure, but the magma chamber hardly registered anything. There was more embarrassment than there was outright anger, and not enough heat and not nearly enough pressure to cause a blow-up.

Not enough, that is, until Elden Williams ran into Jose Rios on a particularly bad day in May near the end of that same year.

Every high school has an Elden Williams. Elden was a mildly retarded kid with an ever-present grin on his face. I had known him from the first grade forward, and while we had never actually been “friends”, I had learned to tolerate him a little better than most anybody else, including his teachers.

Elden loved school buses. After his Special Ed classes he’d usually show me a large foldout manila page with his latest creation on it. Sometimes it was an overly large greenish yellow bus with just about every race and nationality represented through over-sized too-squarish windows. Other times it might be a front view showing a fat bus driver, or even a top view. For Elden, school buses were It!

That Friday, when I looked up from the sidewalk where the fire ants were devouring the leavings of a thrown down sandwich in the bus yard and saw Jose ripping a large manila sheet in half and registered the tears streaming down harmless Elden’s face, the caldera of my whole self went pyroclastic.

Jose Rios spent three days in the hospital. Maybe he had been milking it for sympathy. That could have been it. But just maybe he hadn’t wanted to return to school and have to face me. All I do know was that I discovered what I was capable of. I never saw him, but I heard reports-he had a broken nose, a number of contusions on his head where I had reportedly rammed it into a school bus, and a cracked clavicle.

Volcanoes are blindly and unintelligently violent. If they were to have a viewpoint, I suspect it would be like that day in May when Jose set me off. All I could recall after hearing Jose Rios’ animal-torture laugh was whirling, blurring motion.

As we moved off into the heat and brightness of the new day, I allowed myself to feel what I was feeling. And as I did, I calmed. Thankfully, Hank kept quiet.

God bless ‘im.

“Your supplies,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go get ‘em.”

We were out into the countryside. The highway had become little more than a series of bridges over North Texas creeks and lowlands. It reminded me a little of summer camp; those roads, and Hank and Dingo and Julie to keep me company, much the same as good friends of summers past. But Julie wasn’t with us.

It was turning into a hot day.

Hank guided us.

Outside of Childress by about ten miles, Hank had me take a left down a gravel county road. We were exactly nowhere, I’d say. Hell, we could have been in the middle of remotest Africa, but for the presence of a few road signs.

I thought of the dream I’d had about Africa and Julie, and shivered.

We made another three miles down a narrow, gravel road; our only encounters, the occasional deer regarding us docilely like the interlopers we were.

Hank directed me to turn left.

We stopped and Hank climbed out and unhooked a barbed-wire gate, one of those kind that is nothing more than three strands of wire and a couple of posts. He dragged it off to the left, held it and motioned me through. I waited as he put the gate back and climbed back in.

We followed narrow ruts through high weeds.

“You sure you know where you’re going?” I asked him.

“Sure as anything else about this trip,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

About a half-mile through nothing but weeds and cow pasture and there was a house ahead among a grove of oak trees. As we approached I could make out a large double-wide trailer house up on blocks and minus its skirting. There was a bass boat on a trailer parked up close to the front porch and a couple of pickup trucks parked in the yard.

“This is it,” Hank said. “Stay here for a minute, Bill. And mind the dogs.”

“Dogs?”

Then I saw what he meant. I’d never seen so many dogs in one place. There were all kinds, from little terriers up to big tick hounds and every gradation in between, and they all came running up to the car, tails wagging and thumping against the Suburban. A big chow planted his paws up on my window, black tongue lolling and dripping drool. So far though, not one had so much as barked. I could hear a few nervous growls, though.

Hank moved between the trucks amid an entourage of canines scurrying about his feet and hips. He petted the taller ones that he could reach without bending over and stepped up on a wide porch. The porch had bowed wooden railings that had seen too much rain and not enough sealant. Hank knocked on the side of the house.

“Carpin,” I said to myself. “If you hurt her I’ll kill you.”

The front door opened. It was dark inside but for the fluctuating blue light of a television screen hidden from view.

I waited all of five minutes. Hank finally emerged from the house, dogs in tow. I rolled down my window.

“Okay,” he said. “I need your help, now.”

“What are we loading? I’ve already forgotten.”

“You ain’t forgot. You’ve got that woman on your brain and you can’t see or think of anything else. Come on. A little work will be good for you.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Cooder is fresh out of C-4 and Prima.”

“Oh. Yeah,” I said. “Nitrates?”

“Yep. By the way. No smoking in the Suburban for awhile.”

“Fine by me,” I said.

Nitrates. That word called something to mind, but it slipped away. I looked up at Hank. Then I had it. The Oklahoma City bombing. A small truck filled with nitrates had taken out a whole multi-story building and all the people inside it. The first domestic terrorist bombing on American soil.

“Hank. Nitrates? You sure about this?”

He looked at me.

“What’s your idea?” he asked. It was a serious question.

I thought for a minute.

“Never had one,” I told him.

“Good. That’s what I’m here for anyway.”

I looked up through the trees into a patch of blue sky. Far off on the horizon there was a line of dark blue. A storm of some kind. More than likely, if my luck hadn’t undergone a change, it was bearing down on us.

I thought about nitrates.

I’d seen up close the results of two explosions in my life. One was the one I had just experienced first-hand, blow-by-blow, a little over two days past. An old man had died in that one. It hadn’t been very pretty. I knew I’d be carrying those last few moments with Dock around with me for the rest of my life.

My first explosion, however, had to do with a tractor-trailer rig that had wrecked and blown sky-high at the entrance to our country neighborhood when I was a kid of about fourteen years of age. A dynamite company had leased the pasture behind us and they stored gun powder in trailers all along the back forty. At first I had thought that one of the dynamite rigs out back had let go, but a glance out the window and a quick count ruled that out. I ran down the road that led into our dead-end neighborhood on a spring morning before the school bus was due and I saw the wreckage out on the highway. There were about ten thousand little steel rings in a circle about a hundred yards in radius, the “o-rings” that were supposed to keep the gunpowder hermetically sealed. Amazingly the driver had lived through it. I remembered wondering at the time if he would ever haul dynamite or gunpowder again. If it had been me, I knew I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Explosions. Storms. One or the other, or possibly both were coming, bearing down upon us with all the inevitability of fate.

“I’ve come this far,” I said, and climbed out into the herd of dogs.