BOOM CLICK CLICK
by William Pauley III
Divey Crunk wriggles his fingers through a spaghetti mess of wires, examining each of them closely before tossing them back into the chaos. His goggles are dark and fogged from the perspiration pouring down his forehead. He wipes the backhand of his glove along his hairline and again digs into the knot-ball of wires.
“Damnit, Divey, this is taking too long! I’m out, man! I’m facking out!” says a tall man with a thick Cockney accent.
“Shut your goddamn mouth, Reynold, and watch the door! I’m telling you, it won’t take but a minute to solder. I just have to find the right facking wire first. If I have to…” His words trail off into undecipherable mumbles.
Reynold walks to the back door of the van, peeks out the window, and anxiously bobs up and down, as if holding back a river of piss.
“Do you mind? You’re breaking me facking concentration!”
“I can’t help it. This sneaking around business always gets me heart a thumping.” Reynold tries to calm his nerves. He holds his breath. Unconsciously, he begins to swing his hips, doing his piss dance again. Divey slams his toolbox against the metal floor of the van and clutches his skull with both hands. The vein in the middle of his forehead is throbbing in anger.
“You know, I think I’m going to get a bit of fresh air. Yeah, that’s what I need. It’s getting a tad bit stuffy in ‘ere.” Divey doesn’t move. “Yeah…so, ah, well…I guess I’ll just beat on the side of the van if I see him coming, yeah?” Divey grumbles. Reynold nods and hops out of the van.
The concrete is wet and glistening like a blanket of diamonds underneath the ginger glow of the streetlamp. The van sits in an otherwise empty parking lot, outside a minor league baseball stadium. The air is clean, fresh, as it always is after a good rain. He takes a deep breath and wipes his finger along the edge of the side glass window. The yellow paint of the van is beginning to chip away, revealing the original eggshell white underneath. The words, ‘BRACKFAS BURRITOS ¥99’ are written in giant red lettering across the side panels and doors.
A flitter of light reflecting off a small metal object lying on the ground catches the corner of his eye. He walks over to it and picks it up. It is a small round coin with Japanese lettering on either side.
“Ha, fancy that…a 500-yen piece! I guess it’s me lucky day.” Reynold bites the coin and buries it in his front pocket.
“Whatchu got there?” a man’s voice asks from the darkness—deep and gravelly. Pete. Reynold’s nerves jump.
“Ah, heya there, Pete…I just found me a bloody 500-yen piece, just lying ‘ere on the pavement. Imagine that, huh?” There is a nervous quiver in his voice. He slowly backs toward the van. Pete steps out of the shadows, revealing three hundred and forty-nine pounds of pure American meat tightly tucked into a pair of black sweatpants and a red Members Only jacket—no shirt.
“Heh, yeah, imagine that…” Pete lights up a fag. “Go fetch your brother, we’ll have one last smoke together.” Reynold nods his head and jumps in the back of the van.
“Christ, Divey, put that shit away! Pete’s outside!”
“Just in time, too…” Divey tosses a screwdriver in his toolbox. He turns around quickly and aims an orange plastic gun directly at a remote sensor installed in Reynold’s right eye socket. The gun he is holding is a 1984 model Nintendo Zapper.
“Have you lost your facking mind?!” Reynold says, cupping his hands over the sensor.
“Relax, the gun is rigged to go off on the third pull of the trigger. All we have to do is get Pete to go last.”
“And you’re sure you fixed the generator too, right?”
“Of course I fixed the generator, what kind of dumb-arse bloke do you take me for?” Divey takes off his gloves, pulls a wooden pipe out of his front shirt pocket, and smiles. “Let’s smoke, brother.”
Divey stuffs the plastic gun into the waistband of his jeans and hops out onto the pavement.
“Hey there, Pete… no luck I see,” Divey says as he lights his pipe.
“No…no luck.” Pete takes a long draw from his fag and exhales for what seems like an entire minute. Reynold hops out of the van, his cigarette already lit.
“Well, you know what that means…” Divey removes the light gun from his beltline. “We zap for it.”
“You know, I was thinking, we could always wait until the next town to do this. I mean, shit, we still have a couple days’ worth of rations. We may not have to do this at all.”
“That’s what you said in the last town. And the town before that. Things gotta change ‘ere, Petey boy. We’ve gotta stay ahead of the game. Right now, we’re eating up all of our profit—literally. We’re supposed to sell our burritos, not eat them. And now with the shortage of meat, well…one of us just has to go.” Divey pulls a long black cord from the bottom of the gun and plugs it into an electric generator sitting on the pavement behind the van. “This is the only fair way to choose which one of us has to make that sacrifice.”
“Okay, boss. You’re right.” Pete bites his upper lip. “But, if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to go first.” He takes one final draw from his cigarette before stomping it out with his boot. Reynold’s mouth drops open. His cigarette burns a hole in his shirt as it falls to the ground.
“Wait, why should he get to be the one who chooses?” says Reynold, batting the ashes off his shirt. “Yeah, you know, I think I want to be the one who goes first.” He smiles smugly at Pete and puts another cigarette up to his lips, lighting the wrong end by mistake and inhaling a lungful of torched filter. He hunches over and begins to cough. “Shit, that was me last ciggy.”
“Well, I’ll tell ya what, princess,” Pete says with a smirk, “why don’t you take out that shiny lil’ 500-yen piece you got in your pocket and let’s have us a good old-fashioned coin toss. Winner goes first, loser last, and boss here will go second. How’s about it?”
Reynold looks over at Divey, but Divey shies his eyes away and says, “Sounds like a plan, Pete, but Reynold gets to call it. Fair?”
“Fair,” Pete replies.
“Rey, coin please?”
Reynold digs into his pocket and hands the coin over to Divey. “You sure about this?” he whispers.
“It doesn’t matter what I think, brother, it’s up to fate. All of this is by chance, ain’t it? Whether or not you win this facking coin toss, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost the game. The gun could still go off on any of us at any moment.” Divey winks. Reynold takes a deep breath and nods, trusting that his brother knows what he is doing. Divey places the coin on top of his fist. “Call it in the air.”
He flips the coin.
“Heads.”
The coin flickers under the streetlight and lands in Divey’s palm. He balls his fist around it. An unpleasant stench fills the air—it smells like burnt tire rubber.
“For fack’s sake, tell us what it is!” yells Reynold.
“Wait a second, what the hell’s that smell?” says Divey.
The generator begins to crackle and smoke.
“Shit, Rey, you set the generator down in a facking rain puddle!” yells Divey.
“Well, where else was I supposed to have put it? Everywhere is a facking rain puddle!”
“Well now the generator ain’t going to work properly, you dolt!”
Pete’s eyes narrow like two coin-slots. “Are you both fucking putting me on? That generator has been broken for ages. You know that. That’s why we’re using the fucking thing, because it’s impossible to know when it will fire!”
Reynold and Divey exchange ‘oh shit’ glances. Pete is getting suspicious. Oh shit, indeed.
“Wait a second, you two fucks are trying to set me up! The zapper’s been rigged and that’s why you don’t want me to go first, right?!”
Reynold and Divey stare ahead blankly and slowly shake their heads, as if to say no.
“Right,” Pete says. “Give me the gun.” Divey hands the gun over to Pete, butt-first.
“Fuck it. We’re still doing this. But I’m going first.” Pete holds the gun up to the remote sensor installed in his in his left temple. “You guys have t’wake up pretty early in the morning to outsm—” Pete pulls the trigger. His skull explodes and brain sludge erupts from the crater, spraying along the side wall of the van. His body falls limply to the ground.
“Holy shit! I thought you said the gun wouldn’t go off until the third pull of the trigger!” Reynold yells.
“Fack, but yeah, that was when I thought the generator was working right! Shit! I wasn’t expecting that!”
Reynold holds his hands over his mouth, shaking, and takes a deep breath.
After a moment of silence, he says, “Shit. Why did it have to be Pete, Divey? Why not either of us?”
“I told you before, he’s bigger than the two of us put together. The business could run nearly three times as long from the meat off his bones than it would from either of ours.”
“You know what I mean…”
“Oh shit, you’re not going to get emotional on me, are you, Rey?”
“I just want to know. Why Pete? I mean, fack, we rigged the zapper to go off on him, it didn’t work out the way we planned, but the bloody thing still went off on him. It’s not just that the odds were stacked against him, no, he really had no facking chance.”
“Fate.”
Reynold wipes the sweat from his upper lip. “You know, I never believed any of that shit before today, but I think you’re right, brother. Fate. Damn.” Reynold bends down and removes a pack of fags from Pete’s jacket pocket. He puts one up to his lips and lights it. “Do you think we have the power to change our fate?”
Divey unfolds his palm. The coin is facing heads up. “No, brother, we don’t.” He places the coin in Reynold’s hands.
“But what if this is just some sort of lucky coin? What if it has nothing to do with fate…only luck?”
“You’re asking questions that I can’t answer, Rey.” Divey puts on a pair of canary yellow kitchen gloves.
Reynold holds the coin up to the light. The Japanese writing shimmers in a way he hadn’t noticed before—as if it possessed some sort of magic. He presses the coin up to his lips.
“Hey, once you’re done snogging with that coin, you think you could give me a hand ‘ere?” Divey begins hacking Pete’s limbs off with an axe, tossing the bloody hunks of meat into the back of the van.
Reynold stuffs the coin into his pocket and ties a surgical mask around the bottom half of his face. “I’ll get the trash bags.”
BOOM CLICK CLICK
© William Pauley III, 2010
All rights reserved.
Storytime: "BOOM CLICK CLICK"