Moving Slow

William Long

War-hero Joseph Baboyan missed having a left hand. It had taken him years to master the art of rolling spliffs with only his right hand, but it had been a worthwhile endeavor.
He leaned back into his old green corduroy couch and let smoke curl from his lips. When he was stoned he sometimes forgot that his left arm ended six inches below the elbow. Blown off by a shotgun in 1965 in Long Beach during the Filipino-Californian war. Joseph had been staked out on the roof of an In-N-Out burger trying to snipe Americans who were dug into a high school a block away. Warren Armstrong, native Californian and United States Private First Class, had snuck up on him and fired from a few yards away. The buckshot punched through skin and bone as if it weren’t there at all.
Joseph had fought through pain and panic and unloaded his sidearm into PFC Armstrong’s heart. Then he wrapped up his arm, chopped off the soldier’s head with his machete as was the Ilongot tradition, and went back to base. The medics couldn’t do anything about the arm, so Joseph kept the head as compensation. They flew back to the Philippines a month later, but blue-eyed, blonde-haired Warren hated it there. He never stopped complaining, and being only a head, it was something he got good at.
In 1969 the United Nations stepped in and ended the war when a quake on a minor fault set off a big one on the San Andreas, which triggered a few others, destroying a good deal of Los Angeles and San Francisco and the naval power each city boasted. At that point, neither the Philippines nor California was left with much.
Two years after that Joseph moved to California so Warren would shut up. They lived by the beach halfway up the coast, somewhere pleasantly desolate.
Despite the conflict, they had grown comfortable around one another, because they were the same. Two soldiers maimed by war and by each other. They had given up being mad.
Joseph had put on weight and Warren grew out his curly blonde hair so Joseph could easily carry him around.
“Hey Joe, let me hit that thing, man.”
Joseph took another drag and held the spliff to Warren’s lips. The head took a hit and smoke drifted out his neck. Warren could still get pretty stoned when he wanted to.
“Hey Joe, shit man, it’s getting late. We should get to the bar.”
Joseph nodded. He owned a shack on a street by the beach that he called a bar. He bought it so he could watch the sun set while he listened to the radio and drank beer. He wasn’t a bartender to make a living, what money he made only perpetuated the existence of the bar. Joseph had had a grandfather with a healthy bank account and a weak heart, the old man’s death took care of Joseph’s rent and groceries and reefer. Joseph’s grandfather would probably have another heart attack if he saw where his grandson spent the money.
Joseph groaned as he ashed the joint in an old bowl and stood up. He put Warren’s head in his backpack, shut off the lights and locked the door.
***

Joseph’s bar didn’t have a name or a sign, everyone just called it the bar, or that shack by the beach. It was little more than that. A counter with a cash box underneath, a dozen stools, and a gun hidden behind a refrigerator. Warren sat on the counter while Joseph filled a bucket with soapy water so he could do some dishes. Everything took Joseph a while to do with one arm, but he didn’t mind, especially if he got to watch the sun set. The sky fiery in crimsons, golds, grays and blues. The way the light burned through the crests of breaking waves reminded him of a childhood on the other end of the Pacific.
“Pretty good sunset, huh Warren.”
“I hate looking at this damn beach.”
“Why? This is the best.”
“Because it reminds me I can’t swim. Because some gook chopped my neck in half.”
“You shouldn’t have shot my hand off.”
“You shouldn’t have been on my goddamned native soil, man.”
“California shouldn’t have tried to take our water.”
“Yeah, well that wasn’t my idea.”
Joseph shrugged and plugged in the extension cord that powered his bar. A neon signed hummed to life, spelling out ‘BEER’ in red letters. The fridge woke up. The beer left in there from last night would be cold soon enough. Joseph flipped on the radio.
“Many have I loved, and many times been bitten,/
many times I’ve gazed along the open road.”
Joseph stacked the shot glasses on the counter one by one as he washed and dried them. The bar was empty. Sometimes a Mexican named Juan parked his taco truck by the bar, but he wasn’t there tonight.
“Many times I’ve lied and many times I’ve listened,/
many times I’ve wondered how much there is to know.”
“Warren, what do you think of these guys?”
“What guys?”
“On the radio.”
“Oh.” Warren listened for a moment. “I think they’re shit, man. Change the channel. Some Elvis or something.”
“Change it yourself if you want to.”
“Fuck you, Joe.”
A while later Joseph and Warren smoked again. Some kids who couldn’t have been more than seventeen rolled by on skateboards and stopped to sit at the bar and talk to Warren.
Severed heads that survived the severing were uncommon but they sprung up every now and then. A vacuum salesman had once told Warren he’d heard of another living head somewhere in Mongolia. Warren had attempted a shrug. Most people were uneasy around Warren, they treated him like any other cripple, staring from the corner of their eyes, tiptoeing through conversations. These kids were fascinated, though. “Far out,” they said. Warren liked their attention.
“Hey Joe, get these kids some beer.”
Joseph stared at them through squinted eyes before exhaling smoke.
“How old are you kids?” he coughed.
“Twenty-one sir,” they mumbled.
“All of you?”
“Yessir.”
“Alright,” Joseph set his joint carefully on the edge of the counter and opened the fridge. He pulled the bottles of beer out one at a time, and then popped the caps off one by one. The caps fell into a bucket on the floor under the opener. A tiny sea of red caps. Silver and red.
“A dollar each, boys,” he said as he set the bottles on the bar.
The kids accepted the bottles carefully, as if they might vanish if placed too casually into underaged hands. They took huge swigs and tried not to grimace in front of one another. Joseph chuckled at their pinched faces. That was his favorite part about serving minors. He liked to think he was doing something worthwhile, helping the kids somehow. A philanthropist. The kids left after a while, a little drunk.
“Hey Joe.”
“Yeah.”
“When’s the first time you got drunk, man?”
“I dunno.”
“Come on, man. First time you got totally zonked. A real head-splitter the next morning.”
Joseph looked at Warren.
“I don’t know, a while back.”
“It have to do with the war?”
Joseph nodded.
“Was it when you got drafted? Were you scared to fight?”
“Yeah. And no.”
“Bullshit,” Warren said. “I started drinking when I was fifteen, and I was still scared of fighting.”
Joseph didn’t see the connection but he said nothing. They sat for a while, Joseph drank a beer. It was a warm night, even with the wind blowing in from the sea. None of the other businesses were open along the oceanfront street. Only their little bar and some club a few miles away. If the wind was right they could hear the faint thump of a bass.
“Sure is lonely out here, man, I wonder where Juan is at,” Warren said after a while.
“Do you want me to find you a lady?”
“What?”
“You know, if you’re so lonely. A girlfriend or something. You’re still an eligible bachelor.”
“You’re full of it.”
“Marry some nice girl, maybe?”
“That’d have to be one dumb broad. I can’t wear a wedding ring, and I don’t have a dick.”
“You could put the ring in your ear or something.”
“Shut up, man.”
“I’m just saying. And you could still pleasure a woman, I guess.”
“Fuck you. Turn me towards the beach, I don’t want to look at you for a while.”
Joseph picked Warren up by his wavy blonde hair. He liked holding Warren that way. Like a conquering god carrying the head of his enemy before him. He set Warren on the bar, facing the water. The last trace of light finally faded into the ink horizon, and the sea went black. They listened to the radio and the sounds of the ocean for a while.
“You know Joe, I should have shot you in the head.”
“Things would be different.”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I dunno, man, but I should have.”
Two strangers appeared out of the night, a man and a woman. The man had his brown hair slicked back and he wore nice clothes in a disheveled way. He looked drunk.
There was something about the woman. She had long, curling black hair and golden eyes, a loose shirt that hung low and showed the swell of her breasts. She wasn’t exactly pretty but she was alluring through some primal draw. They sat at the far end of the bar and spoke quietly for a minute before the man laughed and the woman beckoned Joseph over with one long, black-nailed finger.
“Hey Joe, turn me back around, man,” Warren whispered.
“Hello,” Joseph said to the couple, ignoring the head. “What’re you having tonight?”
“Jim Beam and a Bud,” the man drawled.
“No Jimmy here, I got Wild Turkey.”
“Fine.”
Joseph poured the shot and cracked the beer and set them in front of the man.
“And you?”
“Just a beer,” the woman said.
“Four bucks total.”
The man pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and handed four crumpled bills to Joseph who took them and straightened them out against the bar and stuffed them in the cash box under the counter. Joseph didn’t see the woman watching him, but Warren did from the corner of his eye. His decapitation had made him observant.
“Are you from the Philippines?” The woman asked Joseph.
“I am.”
“Did you fight in the war?”
“I did.”
“Which side?”
“I was in the war,” the man interrupted. He looked at Joseph and popped the whiskey down his throat. Joseph said nothing.
“I was in the war, and I killed a whole bunch of people. Some of your buddies, maybe.”
“Maybe,” Joseph said.
“Did you kill anyone?” The woman asked Joseph.
“Not really.”
“You know what,” the man interrupted again, not talking to anyone in particular. “I didn’t really kill anyone neither. I threw a grenade at a foxhole but I don’t think I got anybody. They got me though. Say friend, let me get another shot. A shot for every time I got shot. Five shots of Jim Beam.”
“Only Wild Turkey.”
“Five shots of Wild Turkey then. Four. I just had one.”
Joseph lined the glasses up and filled them.
“Eight bucks.”
“So do you want to see where I got shot?”
Joseph didn’t say anything and the man stood up, wavered for a moment, and undid the buttons on his shirt. Five ugly scars jutted out from the skin around where his stomach was. It looked like someone with burning hands had struck him, fingers punching straight through the skin.
“I can’t eat right anymore,” the man said. “It hurts, like swallowing gravel. One of the bullets is still stuck in me, too close to the spine for the bone-saws to take out. I can feel it sometimes. The lead. That shit’s not supposed to sit in a man, you know?”
Joseph smiled and held up his left arm so the man could get a real look at where the bone had been chewed away by buckshot. The man nodded and let out a low whistle and put back two of the shots, chased with a sip of beer.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Shotgun. Couple yards away.”
“I’ll be damned,” the man said.
“It’s not so bad anymore, though I forget it’s gone sometimes.”
“I know what you mean. Well, not personally. But I’ve heard about that kinda thing before. One of my buddies got his legs-” the man clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, “blown clean off by some Flip’s land mine. He said he sometimes felt like they were still there. The legs. Ghost legs, he called them.”
“That’s a pretty good name for it.”
“Hey, fuck that,” Warren said from the other end of the bar, “you think that’s rough, ask me about my Adam’s apple.”
The man held the fourth shot up and bowed his head solemnly in Warren’s direction before drinking it. Joseph rolled up another joint and lit it and passed it around. After Warren took a hit Joseph offered it to the woman, who just stared at it.
“Want a puff?” Joseph asked.
“No, I’d really rather not,” she said. Her golden eyes shot unconsciously in Warren’s direction. Joseph nodded and passed it to the man before giving Warren a knowing look. Warren shrugged with his face.
At some point in the night the deejay on the radio station changed. The new guy played older stuff. Early Jazz, Armstrong and Bechet. They all sat around drinking, except for Warren. He didn’t like to drink because he couldn’t hold a beer. It defeated the purpose, he said.
“Take a look. So we’re all just pieces of men, then,” the man said after a long time. He turned to the woman and grinned and beckoned Joseph closer. The man leaned forward as if had some privileged secret.
“Hey buddy, you know what this gal is missing?”
Joseph shook his head.
“Come on, take a guess. It makes her real dangerous to guys like us.”
“I don’t know. What’s she missing?”
“She’s missing her goddamned heart!”
The man guffawed until he silenced himself with the fifth shot of whiskey. Warren chuckled and Joseph just smiled. The woman clicked her nails against the counter. She had that look on her face that sometimes women get. A sheet of ice stretched over a boiling sea beneath. There was something not quite right in those golden eyes.
“Hey Joe, turn up the tunes a little, man.”
Joseph turned around and reached for the radio before he caught himself reaching with his left hand. The ghost hand. He kept his arm there and closed his eyes. He could picture it, he could feel it even after all the years it had been gone. He wiggled his ghost fingers, pinky to thumb and back again. The thumb on his left hand had been weird since he was a kid when he had smashed it with a hammer. The nail had never grown the same way again. Joseph had been relieved in a way that it was the left thumb blown off, because he liked his right thumb a lot. A normal thumb.
He thought he could feel the nerves in the arm still, the tendons sliding across muscle, pulling against bone. He opened his eyes and nothing was there. Just a rough stump, uglier than his weird thumb had been.
“Hey, Joe-”
“Keep your hand where I can see it,” the woman purred from the bar. Joseph heard the click of a hammer being pulled back. Joseph had never developed that sixth sense that some soldiers had. The one that told a man a gun was being drawn on him without sight nor sound. He hadn’t known that trick on the roof of the In-N-Out burger and he hadn’t learned it since.
“Hey lady, what the fuck, man?” Warren asked.
“Shut up, head.”
Joseph turned around slowly. The woman had a snub nose .38 Smith & Wesson. Nickel plated, mother of pearl grip, loaded and aimed straight at Joseph’s heart. The man sat there grinning as he had been.
“You want money?” Joseph asked the woman.
“Obviously.”
“Okay, fine.” Joseph said as he moved slowly toward the refrigerator.
“Stop,” she commanded, and he did. “You put all the cash in a box under the counter. Get that, we don’t want any more beer.”
“I do,” the man said. “One more beer on the house, how about it buddy?”
“You lousy trash,” Warren growled. “If I had half a neck more than I do now-”
The woman stalked over and slapped Warren off the counter. He fell and landed with a sick crack on the concrete. The man snickered.
“The money,” the woman said.
Joseph stared at Warren. The head had its eyes open, bright blue, a pool of blood slowly expanded around him like he was some damned religious icon.
“The money!” she hissed.
Joseph reached down for the cash box. Not much in there, he thought. He stood up slowly. He looked from Warren’s head to the steel box and into the woman’s golden eyes. The man just stood there grinning.
Joseph inhaled and hurled the cash box at the woman’s face. The rough steel corner caught her on her right cheekbone and bounced up, tearing off a piece of her eye. The box sprang open and money fluttered around her. The man was so drunk he just stood there grinning.
She shrieked and fired two shots but Joseph had already fallen behind the counter and was moving towards his own pistol behind the refrigerator. An automatic .45 RIA 1911. Tan grip, the rest of the gun black as night. The gun stayed loaded.
The man’s smile dropped when he saw the woman clutch at her face, blood already streaming down her neck and between her breasts. The man pulled her after him and sprinted away just as Joseph grabbed his .45. Joseph leaned over the bar and aimed the weapon but the couple was gone, disappeared around the corner of some building. He fired once into the night to scare them and then there was only the fading echo of the gunfire and Reinhardt’s “Minor Swing” playing through the radio.
Joseph put the weapon down and picked up Warren’s head. He tried to do it gently but that was hard when all he could do was lift the head by the hair. Blood dripped from his neck just as it had on that roof in 1965. He set Warren on the counter and got a water bottle and unscrewed the cap with his teeth.
The water ran down Warren’s face, pink from the blood. Joseph slapped him lightly on the cheek and a few minutes later Warren woke up, eyes unfocused for a moment. Joseph pressed a rag gently against the head to staunch the blood.
“Holy Hell, Joe, what happened, man?”
“That lady slapped you off the bar.”
“Damn,” Warren said as he remembered her. “Golden-eyed cunt.”
“Yeah.”
“So what happened, man?”
“I hit her in the eye with the cash box and grabbed the .45 and scared them off.”
“You shoot them?”
“Nope.”
“Fuck, man, I would have shot them.”
“We both know you can’t shoot worth a damn.”
“Fuck you, Joe.”
Joseph just smiled and cracked a beer and took a few long sips. The adrenaline had sobered him up, he still felt it riding like lightning through his blood. He’d only been at gunpoint twice before that. Once when a junkie had held up a book store and that time on top of In-N-Out, although Joseph hadn’t looked down the barrel of Warren’s shotgun.
He finished the beer and walked out around the bar to pick up the money. Some of the bills had blown away in the breeze, but he got enough of them. He closed the cash box and set it next to Warren.
“Holy shit, man, check that out.”
A piece of the woman’s eye was stuck between the steel seams. It wasn’t golden anymore. A pasty gray jelly dipped in blood. Joseph used the rag to wipe it off and then he threw the bloody mess away.
“Let’s go home,” Joseph said. He was still a little shaky.
“You sure?”
“We just about got robbed and shot. I bet I blinded that lady, too.”
“Who gives a damn about her? She’s a crook and a bitch to boot.”
“Still.”
“Hey man, you weren’t this upset when you chopped my goddamn head off.”
“That was different.”
“Was it?”
Joseph said nothing.
“Well, fuck man. Maybe she’ll be your buddy after this.”
“I’m sorry, Warren.”
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here before the cops want to ask us what happened.”
“Yeah.”
Joseph closed up without cleaning anything. The shot glasses would sit where they were, like the blood on the ground. He put Warren in his backpack and pulled the extension cord from the wall of the building next door. The refrigerator stopped humming, the radio clipped off mid-tune, and the lights died.
It was late by the time they got back and Joseph pulled Warren’s head out of the bag and set him on the couch.
“How’s your head?”
“Stings pretty bad, man.”
He checked it again but it was nothing serious, though Warren had swollen up a bit.
“When you fell it sounded pretty bad. I thought your skull had split.”
“She could’ve at least done me that favor.”
“Do you wanna smoke?”
“Hell, Joe, I thought you’d never ask. Roll that fatty up.”
Joseph rolled another spliff slowly. It wasn’t the best one he’d ever done but it smoked just fine. Warren fell asleep but Joseph stayed up a while longer until the sky started to get light. He went to rub his eyes with his palms but stopped, startled, when he remembered it was only the ghost hand he seemed to feel against his face.
Joseph woke up at dawn, still on the couch, Warren snoring softly beside him. Joseph felt distant from his own body, like he didn’t belong in his own skin. He dismissed the feeling, attributing it to intoxication and violence of the night before. He thought about selling the bar to whoever would buy it, or maybe just closing it up forever and letting the sand creep in through cracks in the walls.