Going Viking - A piece of fiction by Saeihr K Williams

First, it was just we three, She, he, and I. We were sharing one room, one mini fridge, one bed, and one budget. The budget was mostly handled by him, as was the driving. The rest we shared.

There we were, night after night, high out of our minds on whatever pill we had access to that
day. We laughed, we cried, we threatened each other with knives. We bonded. I can’t remember if I ever saw tears in her eyes, and I know he never let me see the tears in his, but I figure they were there, on occasion. Too much happened, he spent too much time alone in that room not letting us in, for him not to have cried a little. Tears come under such stress. We played “Blue October” a lot. That’s a lie. I played “Blue October” a lot. She put up with it, he barely tolerated. But we agreed on music when we cruised through downtown, laughing, me controlling the iPod, him driving, and her in the backseat singing along. “I know a drugstore cowgirl.” She was that cowgirl. I never really listened to the rest of the lyrics, just those. They were all that mattered.

Stress built, though. As stress always does. We were all three young, never spent any great deal of time out on our own before, and we threw ourselves into this without ever really thinking it through. And then it was too late to back out. I had nowhere else to go and neither he nor I wanted her to go. I think he was in love with her. I know I was.

She slept in his bed, right there in the same room I slept. I lay on the floor every night, under my old tan trench coat, tossing and turning, while they slept mere feet from me. I don’t believe anything ever happened in that bed, but it didn’t stop my jealousy. I asked her one time why she never slept next to me. I can’t remember what her excuse was, but it was convincing and very politic. She kissed me, though. It was the single best kiss of my entire life. I’ll always remember that, even when I remember nothing else, I think. He went out everyday. Had stuff to do. She and I were unemployed and un-enrolled at the time. We were slowly going stir crazy in the little one-room dormitory. There was only so many times we could watch the same stack of DVDs before it got tiring.

When he would come back from work or class or whatever girl he happened to be sleeping with at the time we would beg him to go out, do something, get us out of that tiny little prison. He kicked, yelled, got mad, and said he was tired. He just wanted to sleep. Every time the same slow process of trying to convince him to get up.

Our friendship had always been like that, though. We were each other’s punching bags. We took out on each other what we couldn’t take out on the world, he and I. Maybe that’s not a healthy friendship, but maybe, sometimes, it’s all you get, and you’re damn happy you do. The first time we pulled knives on each other we were at a flea market. We were sitting eating slices of pizza bought from a sleazy little corner stall, and suddenly he pushes a blade toward my chest. I stop the hand, thinking he’s only joking, but he continued to push. The point rested against my sternum and I had to hold him back from driving it into my chest. No rhyme or reason, just sudden violence under the hot Florida sun. I never found out what had provoked the attack, or if there even was a reason except to see how it felt. Later that day, I was able to catch him from behind with a pocketknife to his throat. I demanded he give me his knife. With one hand, he did hand the knife to me casually. With the other hand, and another knife, he swung trying to stab me in the leg, and missed. It cut a ragged hole in the thigh of my jeans.

The next time he pulled a knife on me, he got more than jeans. I still have the scar on the leg to prove it.

But by the time we were living together such barbarisms were behind us, for the most part. We still fought, and knives were even still pulled, though never with much meaning. But the majority of our days of going out to deserted parking lots and settling disputes with bare-knuckle boxing were over. We didn’t go “Viking” anymore, as we called it. But stress and the cold and the one meal a day, living 36-hour days gets to a man. It ate at all three of us. It stole our resolves, our inhibitions, our everything. We were wallowing in drugs and the night and just general ambient hatred for nothing or no one in particular. I can’t remember what started the particular argument, but I know it ended with me saying I just wanted to get in a fight. I needed to take it out on someone, needed to see the blood, and let the rage pour out of me with my own bleeding. All three of us, me her and him, all wound up in his little imported car driving through the slums and red-light-districts, looking for some one “in need” of a good beating. There were no pimps beating up women, though. There were no skin-headed young men ganging up on some defenseless street urchin. No one fit to enroll in the little manners class we had
prepared. No one to fit our bill.

He saw the man first. The man was standing there on the corner of two no-name streets under a flickering street-lamp. My very best friend, the man who had stabbed me, and been then drove me to the hospital, the man who tried to help me get with her, and horded her for himself, turned to me, with a savage smile, and he said, “When we get up to that guy, ask him ‘where the white bitch at?’ and he’ll come up to the window. Hit ‘im in the face and slam him with the door, and we’ll drive off.”

“You are completely out of it, man. That guys a coke dealer. Prob’ly got a gun under all those rags. I am not doing it.”

She sat still and silent in the backseat. She was no longer singing. She wasn’t happy. She was frightened out of her mind. In the passenger-side make-up mirror I could see her eyes, wide and staring. In that moment I could make out each drop of perspiration on her brow as she sat there in a cold sweat. For a second, I could have sworn that my mind almost…touched? ...hers. On some very deep, deep level I felt the chill go up her spine.

“Come on, chickenshit, do it!” He called out from behind the wheel. I looked at him. Met his eyes through the aviator sunglasses that he was wearing even now, at three o’clock in the morning. In that moment, I hated him. That’s what I feel most guilty about. Hating my best friend, almost my brother, he was family in every way that counted. Hate filling my eyes the last time I would ever look into his, while he was still alive.

Something in me had snapped, then. Something irreparable. A part of me needed to show

him that I would do it, needed to call his bluff. So, when we came to a stop, red traffic signal

glowing over the intersection, I leaned slightly out of my window and called;

“Hey, man. Where’s the white bitch at?”

The man stood, expressionless, and moved over slowly to the window with a light limp. His

creased, sun-darkened face was contrasted by the grey starting to show in the days worth of

stubble he wore on his chin. He bent down to lean in the window, his hands resting on the

inside of the window-frame. To my side, I felt more than saw my friend tense up. The man

looked us all three over, examining us, almost. The light turned green, but we still sat there.

After what felt like eons and the births and deaths of stars and worlds, the man asked, “What
you fuckin' kids doin’ all the way out here? What ya’ll lookin'”

“Mostly,” I replied, trying to sound calm and collected, but failing miserably, “we’re looking for
trouble”

I swung my left-handed up at the man’s chin, but was stopped short by his hand grabbing mine. He began to squeeze, and I heard bones crack, and felt them start to break. The color must’ve left my face, cause I saw her in the corner of my eye, there in the backseat, and her eyes had done the impossible and grown wider. She looked as if she were about to vomit.

The pain in my hand was beyond screaming.

The man’s expressionless face suddenly grew a nasty grin. I looked into his eyes and saw that they were full of fire. No metaphorical fire raging within him and demanding my blood, but...

literal, gospel truth, fire!

I breathed, “Mother of God…”

“Now that wasn’t very nice.” The man intoned, slowly, enunciating every word. The car lurched as my partner in this particular crime floored the gas pedal, but it went nowhere. I looked at the window frame and saw that the man’s, the thing’s other hand seemed to rest almost idly higher up on the window frame, now. The metal around his knuckles was crumpled slightly. My God, I thought in awe, it’s holding back the car.

I heard a shot fire from right behind me, and tear into the thing’s chest. My mind had seemed to almost shut down, to fold in upon itself, but I was still aware enough to wonder where he’d got the gun.

I was shaking. I turned my head to look at my friend. Out of the corner of my eye, in the mirror, I noticed tears were running down my face, and that she had finally given out and was puking into the back floorboard. The whole car was stinking of it and something else.

Something that smelled like used match heads.

My friend was frozen. The gun, stainless steel glinting yellow from the traffic light, was still pointed at the thing outside the window, but it hung almost limply in his hand, and blood was trickling from his nose. His eyes were glazed over. The gun fell, smashing into my knee. And then my friend fell back against his seat.

The thing outside the window began to speak, but I couldn’t take my eyes off my dead friend, laying there in his seat, blood pouring down his face and soaking into his t-shirt. “I asked you folks what you were looking for, all the way out here, at this little crossroads. Obviously, your friend there was looking for death, so I dealt him it. Now, why don’t you tell me what you want? Do you want him back alive? Do you want that little slut there in the back that can’t hold onto her own guts? Or…” he continued, dropping his tone conspiratorially, “ Do you want her gone too? Do you want her dead for all the time’s she’s shared his bed and not yours? Just say the words, mon ami, and I can make it happen.”

I turned back to look at him. It. The Thing. “No,” I gasped through the pain. “I love her.”

“So you just want to leave him dead, so you can have her to yourself, then, eh?”

“They are…” I choked down a sob of pain as the bones in my hand continued to slowly crush.

“They are both my family. I don’t want either to die.”

“Well, buddy boy, you see, I got shot, so someone here has to die today, right now. Which one?”

“Take me, then”

“Sorry, ol’ bub.” He tightened his grip on my imprisoned fist. “You weren’t given that option.”

“I won’t do it.” I shook my head no as I bit my lip against another gasp of pain. “I can’t”

“You will. You must. Now choose!”

I turned my head to look at her, sitting there in the back seat. She had pulled her knees up against her chest and was rocking and sobbing and staring at noting. It hurt me to see her like this.

“Tick, tock, tick, tock, buddy-boy! Choose now!” it demanded.

“I can’t!” I sobbed. “Don’t do this! Take me!”

“You can’t win them all! Pick one! Now! Which one do you love the most? Or should I ask which one you hate the least? You’ve known him for years, but you lll-oooove her. After all those years of friendship she comes along and tears you both apart. Which one’s worth it? Which one is worth keeping? You can’t have both! CHOOSE!”

I sat there, unable to speak. My best friend lying dead next to me, and the love of my life catatonic in the back seat, in the stench of her own vomit. The only sounds were sobbing and the cracking of bone.

“Fine,” It grinned, “Times up! I’ll take both.”

“NO!” I screamed, pleaded, demanded.

“No?”

“I choose… her. I want her alive?”

“You love her, don’t you?” it asked me, it’s voice now strangely soothing, like an adult talking to a toddler with a booboo.

“Yes.”

“You want her.” It was no longer a question.

“I do.”

“You’d do anything to protect her. Anything to keep her. You’d give everything to make sure no harm came to her.”

“I would.” I was sobbing. No longer really listening. The pain was too much.

“You’d give anything for you and her to be in love,” he almost sang that word “and together forever until death, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t...you?”

“YES! Yes, dammit! Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! Please, just don’t take her away from me. Let her live. What do you want?”

“Oh… oh, buddy-boy, I just got what I want… You just gave it to me.” And with that, he let goof my newly crippled hand, and walked off into dark. I turned to look at her, in the backseat. She was, at last, blessedly unconscious. I reached with my good hand, and made sure of a pulse. She was alive. I knew there was no need to check the body lying in the drivers seat.

I only sat there a while, in shock. I cradled him in my arms and begged him to forgive me. I told him how sorry I was. I told him I had always thought of him as a brother, and begged him to forgive me again. He was beyond forgiveness or apologies or brotherly love now, though.

He was cold and bloody and limp in my arms.

Somehow, eventually, I found myself at a payphone, with some woman on the other end begging me to calm down. She was asking me where the car was. The paramedics came and took us all. She had a full recovery, and we both went to his funeral, together.

I talked to her about what had happened afterward, but she remembered very little. Nothing at all after he had died. That was probably for the best.

The police suspected foul play, but could prove nothing. I was, and probably still am, the prime suspect. But I can’t tell them what really happened. I can’t.

A year after the accident, I married her. We went on to have kids, but it just never felt right. It felt forced.

Late one night, in bed years later, I asked her about maybe a trial separation, to see how things went. She sobbed, and begged me to never leave her. She told me she’d “give anything for us to be together and in love forever,” so she would. Her word choice sent chills though me, but I relented. I didn’t want to see her in such pain.

Lately I’ve been seeing the old crack dealer again. On my morning bus to work, in my office, at the diner where I go for lunch. Sometimes I’ll look out the window at night when I get up to go take a leak, and I’ll see him on the lawn. He smiles, usually. Sometimes even waves, and then taps his watch.

I’m so, so sorry, brother. I am. But it looks like we’ll be able to discuss it plenty before too long.

__________

© Saeihr K Williams 2021

Written 4/18/2007 Revised and Edited 10/22/2009, and again 08/28/2021

”Going Viking"

The preceding is fictitious, and any similarity to any persons, living or dead, or any event is

purely coincidental.