“Guess what I’m not eating,” Willibald says.
“Graham will guilt me into one or two bites.”
Willibald raises an eyebrow. “Oh, well then, guess what you’ll be vomiting.”
I laugh as Graham comes outside and waves around a bowl of red-tinted slop. “Get some, get some. I got the crackers, I got the pretzels, I got the cold beers, I got what you need.”
“You got dysentery,” Willibald says, pushing away the arm Graham is using to hold the dip. “Smells like you learned to cook in Southeast Asia.”
Graham plops down into a chair, feigns being hurt. “I’ll have you know this has won awards.”
“I’ll bet it has.” Willibald looks at me and takes a bite out of a cracker. “Award for fastest shit storm ever.”
“No, that’s Richard here,” Graham says.
“Don’t involve me in your squabble. I came here for the booze.”
“Hurry up and drink it then, Richard. We ain’t got all night.” Willibald hands me a second one and stares until I polish off my first. I crack open the new bottle and he looks away, satisfied that his houseguests are doing the master’s bidding. “Hell, Richard. You take two. Ice that shiner.”
I take a second one, and just like in those fancy commercials from the ’90 s where one dude hands another dude a bottle of beer and the bottle is wet and the ice slides down the side and you can’t think of anywhere you’d rather be, I get that beer. Lay it upside my swollen face. Heaven. Pure Heaven.
I look to Graham. He leans back to meet my eye line, his head appearing behind his grandfather’s. He winks. Gives me a cheers salute. I return it and enjoy the silence.
“Nights like these came and went in the war, you know,” Willibald says, his voice filling with that ashen tone that any grizzled veteran has when he remembers the times where killing was the only business at hand besides dying. “Little skirmishes, getting jumped I guess you boys would call it. They’d send a few guys here, a few guys there. They’d wait until the night had settled in just enough to have shadows for cover but not enough to where their muzzle flash would be a dead giveaway.”
Willibald rubs his bottle across his forehead just as I imagine he did back in the war, taking his cap off and using the back of his hand to clear his brow. “So you had to balance the beautiful evening with the threat of bullets around every corner.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “It was warfare. Demoralize your enemy.”
“It solidified us,” Willibald says. “When God gives you an evening like this, you can’t help but see His hand in it. How the insect song slowly crescendos for hours in synch with the failing light, tuning up just a bit as it tunes out. How the breeze pushes through the tree branches and flutters them in a lullaby. And those sonsabitches would sneak in and shatter it like a jaw in a street fight.”
Graham snickers. “I hear that wasn’t the only bad thing about the Nazis.”
Willibald laughs. “Yeah, but it might have been the worst thing, though.”
“Yeah,” Graham says.
“Did your grandmother ever eat this fish mush?” Willibald holds the dip in one hand, slowly using a cracker to tease out a hunk of the award-winning buffalo tuna dip. Graham smiles and snorts, shakes his head as his grandfather mocks his centerpiece for the evening.
“I like to think Grandma would have loved it.”
“Your grandmother loved fresh salmon and little else. Cajun tuna on a cracker would probably—”
I see Willibald holding the cracker, suspended in air as the first staccato blast cleaves the stillness. The cracker, in slow motion like everything truly agonizing, it explodes into tuna splatters and grain dust as bullets cut through everything.
The dish explodes into millions of cheap white ceramic shards. A glob of Frank’s Red Hot and a can of tuna spray outward like a bad prank. I can’t see Willibald’s hand and I can’t see his smile as he toys with the food and all I can hear are the pop pop pop of projectiles punching through the windows and siding behind us.
Graham turns red and falls or dives I can’t tell and I feel the hellish sting of a round zip an inch or less off of my forehead. I drop, grabbing Willibald’s pants and yanking. Get him down, shield him. I can’t even look up I’m covered in that tuna dip and all I hear are screeching tires.
Adrenaline. Every sound pinches down to a mosquito squeal and I feel my heartbeat thudding. Pieces of the wood deck splintering and flying about. I dive to the old man and his grandson. Just like in the war. Hot lead speaks a language all its own, but still somehow everyone who hears it understands it plainly.
I get a split second where the whites of the shooter’s eyes meet my own. I see his face just enough to feel secure in the fact that the next time I see it I’ll be beating to death the right coward. The facial hair, the baby cheeks and high eyebrows. Ugly.
“Willibald! Stay down!” I’m on my feet, .44 Magnum out and rushing into the yard. A car screams down the road and takes a corner on two wheels.
I charge with everything I have. Across the street. Through the neighbor’s yard. Up and over the fence, rattling like ten thousand scales on a knight’s chainmail as I vault it. Hit the ground in a flowerbed. Trample. Rush forward; dodge a pooch that comes yapping at me after bolting from its doghouse. Over the other fence. Around the house and into the street.
Empty roads greet me. I spin around, hunting. Looking. Listening. Demanding the world to offer me a sound. A target. But as I turn, gun out, and that fresh adrenaline dump turns into burning gasoline in my veins and all of a sudden my lungs are only getting half the air they were a second ago an