Shred of Evidence

What kind of bullshit was “Take Your Kid to Work” day? Jerry Fry swore that if he ever met the paper-pusher who’d dreamt up that faggoty excuse for a teacher’s holiday, he’d make the prick lick his balls. Lick ‘em after he’d been driving this piece of shit delivery van all day with no air conditioning.

Jerry flicked his smoke out the window and concentrated on the potholes and roadtrash, the chop-shops and brick factories, a low-flying Cessna in the clear blue sky. Anything to avoid looking at the boy in the passenger seat. The sight of Paul made his stomach hurt, the kind of hurt no antacid could touch.

His fuckin kid. His fuckin life. Jesus fuck. And the day wasn’t even half over yet. He’d thought about leaving his son at the arcade for the day—kids liked video games—but with his crap luck, Paul would get snatched by a pervert and Jerry would never hear the end of it from Marie.

His whole day was fucked, and he blamed the teachers. The stupid, lazy teachers with their union tighter than a virgin’s cooze. Bastards took the day off, then had the stones to claim they were teaching the little snots something valuable. But Jerry knew his son wouldn’t learn shit trailing after him all day. He’d just be bored and in the way.

“Are we there yet, Daddy?”

“No,” Jerry said. “Shut up.”

Paul strained forward in his seat to root through the glovebox. He found an old box-cutter and began to saw haphazardly at his seatbelt.

Jerry clenched his teeth and clenched the wheel. His fuckin gut was killin him. The boy was killin him. Ten-years-old and as weird as they came. Hated sports, hated school (though Jerry couldn’t blame him), didn’t have a single fucking friend. Jerry’s mother, God rest her shriveled soul, used to say the apple never fell far from the tree, but that was a damn dirty lie. Paul could’ve been the milkman’s son, for all they had in common.

The sound of nylon tearing jolted Jerry from his sweaty, angry thoughts. Paul had cut the seatbelt almost in two.

“For fuck’s sake!” he snapped, strangling the wheel like it was his son’s scrawny neck and praying for patience. Last time he’d blacked the kid’s eyes, Marie had chewed him a new asshole. “Quit that shit!”

“Sorry, Daddy.” Paul stuffed the box-cutter in his pocket.

Christ, the kid caved so fuckin easy. There was no fight in him at all, and for that Jerry blamed Marie. She’d been making their son into a pansy from the day she’d farted him outta her loose, lazy cunt. To hear her talk, Paul was fragile, delicate, in need of constant supervision. She treated him like one of her china figurines. But it wasn’t Marie’s job to make Paul a man, and they both knew it.

The boy’s thin fingers inched back to the belt, pulling at the tear.

“I told you to fuckin quit it!” Jerry shouted. Ripples of fear lapped at the back of his mind. The big bossman, Benny Bright, would be pissed when he saw the torn seatbelt. Or maybe he wouldn’t give a shit. You never knew what’d set Benny off. But because he was hot and aggravated, because he was afraid of Benny, because Marie didn’t get to make the fucking rules, Jerry slapped Paul’s head into the grimy dashboard. The boy’s weight thrust against the frayed seatbelt, splitting it in two to spill him onto the floor of the dirty van among crumpled takeout bags and yellowed racing forms.

Paul began to cry.

“Aw, quit your bellyaching,” Jerry said. He hauled the sniveling kid back into his seat by the worn collar of his Red Wings t-shirt. “I didn’t hit you that hard.”

Jerry turned onto Brick Street, his gut burning. The Chin Brothers’ warehouse was visible in the near-distance.

“Where we going, Daddy? Is it far?”

Jerry frowned so deep it made his forehead hurt. Why couldn’t the kid just shut the fuck up?

“I gotta pee, Daddy,” Paul said. “Can we stop? Or maybe go to McDonalds? They have a bathroom there. It’s gotta be almost lunchtime, and I’m hungry.”

“Then you shoulda eaten your fuckin breakfast.”

Paul’s narrow face tightened.

Had Jerry looked over, he’d have seen the man his son would be at forty, should the boy live so long, a man much like the one who’d sired him. But Jerry was too busy glaring at the potholed road and the sunshiny sky and all the ugly Chinks clustered around the Chin Brothers’ loading dock.

“Mr. Dawson says I gotta give a report tomorrow,” Paul said through gritted teeth. “I’m sposeta tell the class what I learned today. What am I learning, Daddy?”

“Fucked if I know.”

Jerry drove the van past the crowd of busy Chinks around back of the warehouse. Marv and Marlon Chin kept their office—a dented Winnebago—parked next to the crumbling building. Despite the slummy surroundings, the Chin Brothers were worth a fortune. Peddling cheap ashtrays and plastic baby dolls prone to catching fire paid well, and that wasn’t even counting the green they earned working for Benny Bright.

Money came so easy to some people. It pissed Jerry off, forced him to catalogue mistakes made and bad paths chosen. Dropping outta high school in the tenth grade, for one. Knocking up that slut Marie, another. She’d lost the baby in her fourth month, but by then he’d been stuck in the bear trap that was her cunt.

So many mistakes.

Like telling his old man to get fucked when he’d offered to get Jerry a job alongside him at the Quaker Oats factory. If he’d taken his dad’s offer, he’d have been part of the strongest union in town—after the fucking teachers—with three weeks paid vacation and full dental.

Jerry looked at his son. Paul’s teeth were a picket fence on the verge of collapse. Fuckin kid was gonna need braces for sure.

“Mr. Dawson’s gonna make me stand up in front of everyone,” Paul muttered. “I’m gonna have to tell what I did today, and they’re all gonna make fun of me. Jack Monahan’s dad is a doctor; he got to go to the hospital—”

“I’ll put you in the fuckin hospital, you don’t shut up,” Jerry said. “Now sit tight. I gotta make a delivery.”

“I hadda stay in the car the last three places, Daddy. Can’t I come? Please? I wanna see what you do.”

“I pick things up,” Jerry said. “I drop things off.”

“But Daddy—”

Jerry drew his hand back to smack Paul’s loud mouth right off his face and froze. Maybe it was how the dull sunlight shimmered through the dirty windshield to crest upon the boy’s pinched features, but the look on his face…oh, Christ, that look. Like Paul was the last kid chosen to play pickup ball, the kid no one wanted to French during Spin the Bottle. The son was like the father. The apple never fell far from the tree.

Jerry remembered his old man coming home from Quaker, beatdown and stinking from a twelve-hour shift spent over the steamy vats. He’d kick off his work boots and sit mute in front of the tube drinking bottle after bottle of warm Rolling Rock. Standing at the periphery of his father’s steadily blurring vision, ten-year-old Jerry would rustle through his knapsack, hoping that the bent old man (who’d seemed ancient even at thirty-five) would ask to see the spelling test with the big red F scrawled across its front. Even a beating was better than silence.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” the boy whispered.

“Shit, Paul, can’t you be quiet for once in your fuckin life?” Jerry said, but most of his anger had drained away. He dropped his hitting hand to his lap where it lay limp and useless like his dick. “You can’t come with me, okay? The people I work for don’t understand shit like ‘Take Your Kid to Work’ day. If they knew I’d brought you along, they’d laugh at me.”

Or worse, but Paul didn’t need to hear about that.

“Mr. Dawson said it used to be ‘Take Your Daughters to Work,’” Paul said. “For girls to learn they could have any job they wanted. But it wasn’t fair to boys, so they changed it.”

“Good for them,” Jerry said. “Bitches got enough of a free ride without a whole special goddamn day.”

Paul nodded, his eyes open and ready to receive, and in that moment Jerry felt like he had at seventeen: Marie beneath him, lithe and limber, the cool river breeze blowing across his naked back. Not a sexual thing—he was no sicko like his Uncle Marcus—but a power thing. A king thing. Jerry felt like the boss of everything, felt strong and smart enough to be a bright light in his son’s dim eyes.

“You’re a good boy,” he said. “Stay in the van.”

“Okay, Daddy.” Paul rubbed at the purplish knot swelling up on his forehead. Jerry wasn’t too worried about the boy ratting him out to Marie. Fathers and sons could keep secrets sometimes, and maybe today wouldn’t be as bad as he’d feared. A few more morning deliveries, then lunch. A couple drop-offs this afternoon. If he worked fast, he’d be done by two, and maybe he’d take the boy down to the track to watch the ponies run their paces. Put a fin on the favorite, and let Paul hold the ticket. If he won (and hell, it happened sometimes), he’d let Paul keep half, give the boy a real life lesson to recite to his classmates: how I won ten bucks at the track with my dad.

Jerry’s feet crunched against gravel and broken glass as he unloaded the unmarked wooden crate from the back of his van. Benny had said either Marv or Marlon could take delivery; one brother was as good as the other. The Chins had been skimming again, and Jerry had been asked to deliver a message.

Not asked. Told.

A burly black guy stood guard in front of the Winnebago. “Nice to see you again, Jerry,” he said, scratching his belly through his Pistons jersey.

“Go have a cigarette, Troy,” Jerry said as he climbed the splintered wooden steps to the trailer’s rusty door. “And smoke it out front.”

“Sure, Jerry. Whatever you say.” Troy wandered away with his big hands clasped behind his back. He owed Benny Bright a lot more than he owed the Chin Brothers, and would smoke half a pack of cigarettes before coming back to his guard-post. No one had any loyalty these days. Especially niggers.

Jerry rested the crate against his thighs, panting a little. It wasn’t so heavy, just a fucking chainsaw, but he was getting old and he was getting fat and the days when he could bench 310 were far behind him.

But he could still do good work, so he was still a man.

Glancing back at the white van with BRIGHT DELIVERY SERVICE stenciled on the side, Jerry wondered what his wife would make of it all. Marie would’ve never let the boy come to work with him if she’d known what he really did all day. Married twelve years, and the dumb cunt still thought he delivered appliances.

Jerry wanted someone to know about his chosen profession.

Oh, the things he could teach Paul, had he the nerve: like the importance of wearing a constant poker face, telling no one what you really did for a living, not even in the heat of the moment when you were nailing your wife and it seemed so right that she should know your every secret; like the importance of wearing rubber gloves and a smock for the wet work, or else good luck explaining the blood to Marie; like the importance of a dramatic entrance.

Jerry kicked the rusty screen door off its hinges and stomped into the office. He slammed the crate down on the cluttered metal desk, knocking over a photograph of a smiling slant-eyed boy, and ripped the Walkman headset from Marv Chin’s ears.

“Benny’s not happy,” he said to the pissant Chink who’d overestimated their boss’s patience one too many times.

Marv blinked like a dope, barely listening. He’d been into the Oxycotin again, most probably. And there was the problem: Marv and his younger brother Marlon were supposed to push the pills, not pop ‘em.

“Scram, Jerry,” he said, yawning so wide his jaw creaked. “Today’s not delivery day.”

“You’re right. It’s not.”

“So go ‘way.” Marv rattled a mess of papers, most of them upside-down. “I’m busy.”

Jerry took his utility knife from his belt loop and pried the lid off the crate. “Sorry, Marv. I got a job to do.”

He took the chainsaw from its bed of straw and thrust it at the Chink. The sound of gasoline sloshing in its small plastic tank was like ocean waves lapping at a beach.

“Fuck! Put that thing away!” Marv scrunched back in his chair, his bloodshot eyes evaluating the chainsaw blade like he was counting up its teeth and considering his odds.

“Hands on the desk, Marv.” Jerry grinned. This was gonna be way too easy. Way too fun.

And as the little man in the expensive golf clothes babbled—saying he was sorry, he’d do better, he’d get clean, just call it off, whatever it was, call it the fuck off, please!—Jerry the Deliveryman, who was so much more than that, put the chainsaw down on the desk.

“Oh, thank Christ!” Marv said. “I knew you could be reasonable! How much to walk away? Just name a number.”

“I work for Benny,” Jerry said. “I’m not here to bargain.”

Slowly, he put on the yellow rubber gloves and see-through plastic smock he’d stored in the crate. He picked up the chainsaw, flipped the choke, and yanked the pull-start. It roared to life on his second try, filling the office with dense, oily smoke.

“This isn’t a killing visit, you understand?” he shouted over the chainsaw’s rough growl as the Chink trembled in his chair. “This is just…to teach you. Benny’s been so patient, Marv. He really has. But he can’t be no more. It’s bad for business.”

Jerry waved the chainsaw’s ratcheting blade over the Chink’s head like a priest making the sign of the cross. “Left or right?”

Marv hid his hands under the desk.

“If not you, then him.” He pointed the buzzing chainsaw at the photo of Marv’s son. “Your boy’s a good lookin kid. Takes after his ma, huh?”

Something in the Chink’s face slammed like a steel door: hope of escape, maybe. “Let’s get this shit done,” Marv said, and placed his left hand flat against the desktop. His emerald pinky ring glinted dully under the fluorescents.

As Jerry set to work, he imagined Paul standing in front of a classroom of dicks and bitches, the sons and daughters of the working-class neighborhood men who’d been looking down on Jerry for years, always talking shit like they were so much better than him.

If only they knew.

He’d pay good money to sit at the back of his son’s classroom and listen to Paul say, I learned a lot going to work with my dad. I learned you can cut a guy’s hand off with a chainsaw real easy cause that sucker tears through bone in two seconds flat. I learned it don’t matter if they scream so long as there’s no one around to listen…

Smiling like a man who was proud of his work and proud of himself, Jerry turned off the chainsaw and put it back in the crate. He tore a tourniquet from Marv Chin’s blood-splattered golf shirt and tied it tight around the little man’s spurting right wrist. The blood stopped almost immediately.

Marv flopped back in his chair, groaning. His pale hand remained on the desk, twitching. The emerald pinky ring beat a staccato rhythm against the metal desktop.

“Aw, you’ll be alright,” Jerry said. “You won’t die. Not if Benny don’t want you dead. When Troy comes back from his smoke break, he’ll get you patched up—”

“Uh, Dad?”

Jerry wheeled around, holding his arms over the bloodied smock in a vain attempt at concealment, and had a moment of picture-perfect recall: trying to cover his boner with a stained copy of Swank as his father stood in the bathroom doorway, glaring…disgusted.

“Go back to the van,” Jerry told his son, his breath coming in short little bursts. Oh, the fuck up of it all…Benny would be so pissed, and if the boy told Marie…

“I hadda pee,” Paul said from the doorway. He stared at the Chink. “So this is your job?”

God, but Jerry was sick of lying, so stuffed to bursting with stories he’d never had the chance to tell.

“Yes,” he said finally. “This is what I do.”

Paul pointed at the hand on the desk. “Can I touch it?”

It no longer trembled. Jerry couldn’t see the harm.

He watched with pride as his son picked the hand up by its thumb. “Does your wrist hurt?” Paul asked the Chink as he dangled the hand in the air.

“What the fuck you think?” Sweat poured down Marv’s chalky face. “Get this fucking psycho away from me, Jerry!”

“Watch yourself. That fuckin psycho’s my boy.”

“Aw, and I bet you’re so proud.”

Paul gripped the dismembered hand and pretended to shake. There was blood on his t-shirt. “Nice to meet you,” he said to it. “I’m Paul Fry.”

He squinted at the Chink. “You still have another hand, huh?”

Marv stared at his stump. “What’s your fuckin point, kid?”

Paul took the box-cutter from his pocket and pointed the sharp blade at Marv’s remaining hand. “I could help you, Daddy,” he said. “I could cut off the other one.”

“It’s okay, Paul,” Jerry said. He lifted the crate under one arm and smiled; already his burden felt lighter. “Mr. Chin’s learned his lesson. We don’t wanna overdo it. Besides, a man can’t earn with no hands.”

“That makes sense,” Paul said, and returned his father’s smile. Jerry’s heart squeezed like a fist. How long had it been since someone looked at him with such pure, unadulterated admiration?

Marie always gave him shit for being too distant, too cold. You want the boy to be a stranger to you like you are to your dad? she’d say. A smack or two usually shut her up, but Jerry found himself regretting those hard, flat slaps that left pink ghosts on her tired cheeks. Marie was right: it was important to forge a link with the man-child you’d made, that apple from the tree. A son could be like a loyal dog or a best buddy—someone you shared secrets with, leaned against when the world went to shit.

Paul clutched the box-cutter tight, his eyes like chips of granite, and grinned at the Chink. Jerry had felt that same cold smile on his own lips a thousand times.

Paul was no milkman’s son.

“Dad?” he said, dropping the stiffening hand onto Marv’s lap. “All the places we stopped this morning? Did you cut hands off there, too?”

“Nope. This one was special circumstances. Sometimes I make deliveries. Sometimes I pick things up. Money mostly—”

God, but it felt good to talk. To own up to the things he’d done, these things he was so proud of. It was crucial that Paul know his father as much, much more than a delivery man. This was how legacies were made. This was how pride was restored.

“—and sometimes people need some fear put in them.”

“You do that? You make them scared?”

“I do.”

Paul considered this for a moment, then took his father’s free hand. It was a babyish thing for a big boy to do, and slightly faggy, but Jerry let it slide. He and his boy were having a moment.

“Here, this is yours.” Paul held out the box-cutter.

“Nah, hang on to it,” Jerry said, thinking about the nigger pimp who worked the airport HoJo’s and the disc jockey downtown who was into Benny for almost six grand. They were on Jerry’s list for the afternoon, and it wouldn’t hurt to have a little help. A chainsaw was too heavy for a ten-year-old, but Paul could hoist the box-cutter just fine.