The Spot: Stories

The part when the guns go off and the horn doesn’t honk: There is a random anarchy of the moment — amid the yelling, the shouts, the fear — smoothed by the swaying willow branches, which make a soft, almost broom-sweep sound against the chain-link fence; men face one another with weapons drawn in a standoff, posited, posted, tensions created; the wiry guard is stark-still, frozen, producing more fear in Byron because the immutability, the cold posturing seems — and this is a quick mind-flash — inhuman, his eyes unmoving. The larger guy sways on his heels, both arms out with his gun. The swaying is imperceptible to everyone except August; August, too, is moving a little, and he feels, amid the conjoining of many sensations, an awareness of his weight and heft, hanging over his belt, tightly packed in his legs, as a significant disadvantage. He is a large target. But he is too involved in the tension, in the urgent dynamic before him, to think too much about this fact. The entire thing resolves itself down into those positions, into that tension, into the guns drawn and the directions they are pointed while, from the car, from her vantage, she watches and tries to see and sees only one side, one angle of the action: two men dressed in uniforms of pale olive, with stitched patches indicating their names, one fat and one thin, standing fearfully with their guns out, beneath the direct implications of the noon sun; Byron and August out of sight, positioned almost behind the truck, just their guns visible, pointing; the bags of money weighty and heavy at the feet of the larger man; all frozen there for a moment in the fear and agony until there is the flash of muzzle fire and then — in what seems to be a modulated time/space, not slow motion but rather something else, a kind of compact glimmering shimmer of movement — the fat man falls to the side, collapsing under the weight of his torso as his knees give, falling to the ground and then bowing down, prayerfully, his dark oil-slicked hair glinting in the light and his scalp bright red with sweat until another bullet hits and the top of his skull flowers with bone and spray; then the other man falls, too, his lean, slim body folding over sidelong and leathery; his own bones frail and delicate so that he appears to come down to the earth with a sliding motion, like a leaf in the wind, crumpling over himself.