Chester rested one hand on the door like a lump of dough. “You shouldn’t say that to me.”
“Oh, he’s all mad now,” the kid said, forming his mouth into a pout. “He messed himself. He’s starting to cry.”
“He’s a retard,” the driver said. “Leave him alone.”
“He’s cute,” said the kid in the passenger seat. “We like you, little buddy. Want to meet some girls?”
“You’re very mean,” Chester said.
“We’re finished here,” the driver said. He leaned toward the passenger window. “You hear me? Get your hand off the door.”
When Chester didn’t move, the driver smashed his hand.
“Owie,” Chester said.
The three kids laughed.
Chester got behind the wheel of his vehicle. He started the engine but could not hear its sound and had to rest his hand on the dashboard to make sure it was running. He had entered one of those soundproof moments in his life that belonged to neither the past nor the present. The catalyst and the consequence were always the same. Contempt, ridicule, public shame, followed by his eardrums swelling so tightly he couldn’t hear, and his optical nerves popping loose from the backs of his eyes, deconstructing the external world piece by piece.
For perhaps thirty seconds, the backs of his eyelids were a red veil on the other side of which stick figures performed gross acts and fought one another with staves and staffs like the caricatures in tarot cards. It was funny how life replicated the tarot rather than the other way around. Maybe that was how thought worked. You had the thought, then the thought became the thing. That was why bad thoughts were to be avoided.
The moment passed, and the world reassembled itself, and Chester drove into the street and down to the intersection. Ten minutes later, the three boys in the SUV pulled out and drove in the opposite direction. They stopped at a girl’s house, a filling station to gas up, a street corner in a black neighborhood to score some weed, a drive-through window for daiquiris, a gun-and-ammo store to buy .22 shells. They parked by a swampy woods used as an illegal dump and took turns pocking holes in a rusted-out car body that had no engine and no glass in the windows. When they were out of shells, they got back into the SUV and Bic-fired a bong.
Chester estimated the range at eight hundred yards. With his gloves on, he loaded nine armor-piercing rounds into the box magazine, then wet the tenth round with his mouth and inserted it with the others. He braced the bipod on the car hood and sighted through the scope. Inside the SUV, the silhouettes of the boys moved back and forth like cutouts on a moving clothesline. He felt a flame lick at his loins, a hardening again in his manhood, a desire that went so deep he knew he would never satisfy it. His ears whirred with sound, his heart pounded, and just as he squeezed the trigger, he felt a dam break inside him and an orgasmic sensation flood through his body, so strong and warm and encompassing that his legs went weak.
There was no movement inside the SUV, nor any sound. The round had punched a hole just below the rear window and probably gone through the seats and the radio. Chester kept the rifle aimed at the same level and delivered four more rounds, blowing pieces of the seats and upholstery and dashboard and windshield onto the hood.
His last shot was into the gas tank. He picked up his brass and dropped it into the pockets of his baggy trousers. Before he pulled onto the asphalt, he glanced through the rear window. One of the kids had spilled onto the ground. One was running through the woods. Chester didn’t know where the third had gone. He turned up the air-conditioning until the inside of the car was frigid and the sweat on his face turned to ice. He thumbed a CD of Brahms into the stereo and took a deep breath through his nose, as though inhaling air off a glacier on the first day of creation, long before a thick-legged quadruped with fins and gills and lungs waddled out of the surf and began its agenda.
HELEN CAME INTO my office on Tuesday morning. She had just gotten back from the sheriff’s department in St. Mary Parish. She told me of the shooting.
“None of the boys were hit?” I said.
“That’s what’s peculiar,” she said. “The shooter clustered five rounds below the rear window and put one in the gas tank. Why didn’t he riddle the whole vehicle if he was out to do maximum damage?”
“How far away was he?”
“Far enough that the boys never saw him. By the way, ‘boys’ isn’t a good term for these guys. They’re walking promotions for Planned Parenthood.”
“No brass?”
“Just tire tracks,” she said. “They may belong to a stolen car that was found in Des Allemands.”
“You think this is our guy?” I asked.
“He was obviously using a high-powered military rifle and probably firing armor-piercing rounds.”
“The kids don’t have any idea who was shooting at them or why?”
“They say a weirdo guy was yelling at them at the DQ.”
“About what?”
“Their radio was playing rap. That was a couple of hours before the shooting. I don’t think they were just playing rap, either.”
“They wised off?”
“Who knows? They’d drown in their own shit if they ever left St. Mary Parish,” she said.