Okay, that part’s actually kind of funny.
Brent wasn’t kidding about his shit job. It is the shit job. He’s kind of the gopher boy at Wal-Mart. Check out, aisle seven. Stock, aisle eight. Puke up, aisle nine. Everybody just dumps the jobs they don’t want to deal with on him. If he’d just tell them all to fuck off and do it themselves, he’d be a lot happier.
I can practically see how this went.
He usually finished around midnight, just before the stockers come in to do their part. This time, he marched out the door at 12:15, right on schedule, and low and behold; there’s a guy sitting on his car.
So Brent walked up to him and gave him a look. Then he waited a good five minutes before finally saying something. “Umm, excuse me, that’s my car.”
The guy popped his neck and then turned around to take a look at Brent. He stared at him for a full minute, not blinking once, before he turned back around.
Brent had no idea what to make of this, so he decided to try again. “That’s my car,” he said trying to keep his voice from shaking. “Could you get off it so I can leave?”
Finally, the guy actually responded. “But I’m hunting vampires.”
Brent took enough time to blink. “Come again.”
“I’m hunting vampires!” the guy said it in a petulant whine, sick of having to repeat himself. “If you drive it away, where am I going to sit?”
He said this, by the way, in a parking lot. Full of cars.
I can only imagine what Brent was thinking right then. Me, I’d get in the car, turn it on, and go fast in reverse. Brent chose the passive-aggressive approach. “Uh, somebody else’s car, maybe?”
The guy actually stopped watching the Pizza Hut door not move and turned around. “But this place is perfect,” he explained. “It’s the only place in the whole parking lot where I’m close enough to see the door and where I can see him before he sees me. Do you expect me to just stand here until someone else parks?”
Brent looked around the parking lot for a second, wishing there was someone else to help reason with the nutcase. “That might be best.” The guy showed no reaction, just kept watching him. “I mean, I really need to get home.” He still didn’t do anything. “Fine,” Brent said finally and reached for the door.
And that’s when Brent almost shat himself, because just as his hand touched the door-handle the guy jumped off the hood and pulled out a gun. “You’re with them, aren’t you?” he screamed in Brent’s face. “Damn you, you sell out! How much did they pay you?”
“But… I don’t…”
“How much did they pay you?”
I’m still not certain why the guy was harping on that fact. Anyway, so Brent was saying his prayers, expecting he was about to meet his maker, when a cop car across the street turned its lights on. As soon as the guy saw it he let out a bloodcurdling scream and ran like hell. “It wasn’t me!” he yelled as he dropped the gun. “It wasn’t me!”
The funny part is that the cop car was going after a speeder. I don’t think he even noticed the screaming lunatic.
* * *
I pounded the table with my hand, laughing my ass off. Brett looked embarrassed, but mostly pissed. I understood why; I could have been more sympathetic about it, but what for?
“Okay, okay,” I said, catching my breath. “But you took the gun?”
“Yeah,” Brent said, staring hard at the floor, embarrassed.
“Why?”
“Well, I could hardly leave it lying around, could I?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Brett gave me this look, like I was suggesting kicking kittens. “And leave a gun lying outside of Wal-Mart so some guy can grab it and go shoot the place up? I can just see the headline now: ‘Entire staff slain in store robbery.’ And I’d be to blame.”
I made that teethy sound you make whenever you’re blowing somebody’s bad suggestion away. “C’mon, with a pee shooter like that? They have the hunting department, right? They have assault rifles back there, right? Any guy who tries to rob them at gun point will get himself shot.”
Brent shook his head. “That requires a manager’s key and he could be stuck at the front of the store.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Then you’re down a few ass-holes. What’s the problem? You don’t like them anyways.”
Brent scowled. “Anyway, after I put the gun in the car, I started thinking about him. That crazy guy, running around, chasing vampires, or whatever.”
“Yeah, so? Why’d that make you want to kill yourself?”
“Because even though he’s running around like a lunatic, he’s still doing more with his life than I am. At least he thinks he’s doing some good. All I do is sit around and watch TV. I’m single, working a shit job, cursed….” He looked up at me miserably.
Oh yeah. The curse thing again. Brent thinks he’s cursed. We’ll deal with that later.
I was thinking about what to say when I noticed he wasn’t looking at me miserably anymore, but at the gun.
“Brent,” I warned him. “You so much as touch that gun, so help me, I will beat the shit out of you. Understand?”
* * *
For all of Brent’s nail-biting, the problem didn’t solve itself in the next half hour. So there the gun sat, like some unwanted prop at the end of a play, waiting for someone to do something with it. We couldn’t just leave it in the trash – the garbage men wouldn’t be coming by until next Tuesday – and I definitely didn’t want to leave it lying around the house over the weekend. Brent always got really bad on Friday nights, and if he got bad enough I might be tempted to use it.
After a minute’s thought I decided that, since the gun wasn’t going anywhere, and if we decided to do anything we should wait a few hours anyway, we might as well use our time wisely. “Let’s get something to eat,” I said.
Brent gave me an are-you-out-of-your-mind look and then said, “What about the gun?”
“What about it?”
“Shouldn’t we take care of it now?”
I shrugged. “Do you have any ideas?”
“Well, no, not really.”
“And neither do I. So let’s go someplace else, think about it for a while, and then do something when we come back.” I pulled on my black, leather jacket. “A few hours isn’t going to make much of a difference.”
“I’m not hungry,” Brent answered, curling up on the couch and preparing to sulk.
“I don’t care. There’s no way in hell I’m leaving you here alone with the gun. You’re going.”
“But…”
“No.”
Brent looked up at me. He still hadn’t quite figured out why, even when he said “no”, I could still strong-arm him into doing something by sheer force of will. “Fine,” he said, standing up and grabbing his coat. “Where are we going?”
“It’s two in the morning. Where do you think we’re going?”
Brent made a face. “Waffle House still isn’t an option, is it?”
“Not unless you like rat poison in your chili.”
“Café Yoko’s, then? But…but…” His face went from annoyed to miserable. “Amy might be there.”
I shook my head. He was so pathetic sometimes. Avoiding a place simply because there was the small possibility that a girl he didn’t want to see might be there. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t have to. By mutual consent, Brent and I had long ago cut that scene.
It only took him seconds to get his act back together. “All right, let’s go. But could you take the sun-glasses off while we’re driving? You can barely see out of them; we could crash and get killed or something.”
I rolled my eyes. “You need to lay off the daytime soaps, drama boy,” I answered. “We’ll be fine. Now shut up and get in the car.”
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