Terminal

The cancer was killing me, eating away at my insides. In a few weeks, it would leave me a husk, like the shells that locusts leave behind on the trees, a hollow shell that used to be Tommy O’Brien. But while it was doing that, while it was gnawing away, it was also liberating me—freeing me to take risks that I would have never taken before. Allowing me finally to do something to make our lives better.

I drove home. It was bingo night, and Michelle had already taken T. J. over to her mother’s house, so I was alone in the trailer. I undressed, and took a good long look at myself in the mirror. I looked like shit. Two black, puffy circles hung beneath my eyes. My skin was pale, feverish; and my jaw and neck were swollen. My cheeks were puffy too. It looked like I had the mumps. My teeth hurt, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the cancer or the fact that I hadn’t been able to afford a dentist in five years. I’d lost weight— like an anorexic on the Atkins diet. Most of all, I just looked tired. Beaten.

I wasn’t beaten, at least, not entirely, but I was tired. Tired of this trailer and thrift shop clothes for my wife and yard sale toys for my son. Tired of this way of life. I was sick of it all, and I was going to do something about it.

I stepped into the shower and let the water wash over me. It seemed to help my headache, so I leaned into the spray, letting it pound against my temples and forehead. My skin had gotten sensitive over the past week, and the stream felt like sandpaper against the sore parts, like it was grinding away the old Tommy and revealing what lay beneath. It felt like a baptism. I thought about the bank.

I was going to do something. What was the worst they could do to me if I got caught? Life in prison? Lethal injection?

Those sentences both added up to less than a month . . .

FIVE

Sherm grinned, took another swig of beer, lit up a cigarette, and said, “Fuck me running. They laid us off, boys!”

From the battered jukebox in the corner, the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin Man” had segued into Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues.” I lit up a cigarette of my own and wailed along with Marvin inside my head— wanting to holler and throw up my hands while inflation grew and bills piled up. Marvin Gaye had known what time it was. He died young too.

“So what are we going to do, you guys?” John stared into his shot glass, as if the answer could be found there. In a way, I guess it could.

“I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. We’re going to stand in the unemployment line and get our asses signed up. Shit, dog, we got the whole summer free! We can sleep all day, party all night, and let the government send us a fat check every two weeks.”

“That’s all right for you, Sherm,” John scoffed, “but I got fucking bills to pay. You know how little money you get on unemployment? Bobby Ray Hall was on it for six months, and he only got a quarter of his hourly pay.”

“Bobby Ray Hall swept floors and scrubbed toilets for a living, and he got minimum fucking wage. We’ll do okay. Better than him at least.”

I said nothing. Instead, I lit up a smoke and signaled Angie to bring us another round. Angie was a damn good waitress, the best Murphy’s Place had to offer— and she still took good care of us despite the fact that Sherm had fucked her a few times, then dumped her. Hell, there weren’t many women in this town that he hadn’t slept with, except for Michelle— and maybe John’s mom. And to be honest, I’m not even sure about that last one.

It wasn’t that he was good-looking. He wasn’t. Well, okay, he wasn’t butt ugly or anything, but he wasn’t Brad-fucking-Pitt either. His nose was too big for his face, and his wiry frame was more coiled than muscled. He always wore a battered Ford cap, usually backward, and his hair stuck out from underneath it. Most of the time, his fingernails were black from the foundry dirt and grease underneath them. Despite all this, women seemed to really dig Sherm. I think it was his attitude— he had that bad boy thing down to a science and it worked for him. The women he slept with fell into two categories: those who thought they could change him and those who were just freaks.

The freaks were every weekend— and never the same girl two weekends in a row. Sherm liked it rough, and he’d give it to the freaks that way. Once, when he was really drunk, this girl from the video store dug her nails into his back, raking them down as she came. They went so deep that she left scars; right through one of his tattoos. Sherm, in the heat of the moment, punched her in the jaw. He didn’t mean to do it, he claimed later, and he felt like shit immediately after it happened, but that still didn’t make it right. Any woman with an ounce of sense would have gotten the hell out right then and there. But not this freak. Nope. She not only liked it, she begged him to do it again. So he did. He hit her again. Later on, he told us that it was the best nut of his life.