Sleeping Hornet
by Michael Hansen

Joel's rattling on a mile a minute as they walk down the street, his round face as fierce as if he knew what he was talking about. "What you gotta remember is, you need fire power. I mean, when you first come through the door, you gotta show them you mean business right off, you know?" Ray nods without listening, not looking at his be-bopping partner; he's busy continually scanning their surroundings. They're in a run down residential area dominated by dilapidated houses and an endless procession of rusting seventies gas-guzzlers hibernating at the curb. Their own dinosaur of an Impala fits in perfectly, parked half a block behind them.

Guns. Hardware. Joel was good enough when the chips were down, he'd never snitch you off or leave you in the lurch, but he was in love with his own voice. Joel especially loved to talk about weaponry; he could go on for hours. When he ran off at the mouth like this, Ray had learned to just keep his mouth shut and nod occasionally like he was listening. That way Joel thought he had an attentive audience, Ray didn't have to make conversation, and everyone was happy.

"There's the Baron's house," Joel says loudly, pointing with one stubby finger at a chalk-pale green bungalow two houses down. Ray winces inwardly, no expression marring his pale hatchet of a face: anyone tailing them would see what Joel was pointing at, maybe figure out their next move.

The tiny cottage is set back from the street behind a dead yellow lawn; it needs a coat of paint, badly. The warped gate in the low chain link fence squeals as Joel pushes it in and leads the way up the short concrete walk. Ray follows him close as his shadow, deliberately slumping his bulky shoulders in old habit, changing his body outline for potential witnesses. He can hear Lynyrd Skynrd playing softly somewhere inside the house. As they mount the postage stamp sized porch, Ray sees someone twitch back a curtain at a window next to the door; the music switches off. Ray pretends not to notice the unseen scrutiny. 
Someone inside quietly pulls the door open a little, and a man stands in the narrow opening blocking Ray's view of what lies inside. His gray, thinning hair is drawn back into a pony tail. He's shirtless, exposing the physique of a tanned gymnast, with no body fat whatsoever to blur his rippling bronzed muscles; he's covered in crude jail house tattoos. From the shoulders up he is a much older man, however: the bones of his skull lie close to the surface, barely concealed by the tight-drawn seamed leather skin of his face, a face that reveals nothing as he stares at them flatly; the whites of his eyes are yellowed.

"I thought you were coming alone," he says, speaking to Joel but looking dead at Ray.

Joel shuffles forward, nodding his head and grinning. Ray is reminded of one of those porcelain dogs nodding their spring loaded empty heads on the dashboard of a car. "It's cool, Baron, my friend's cool," Joel says. "I had to bring him man, -- "

Ray leans past Joel to interrupt. "The money's mine," he says, staring right back at the Baron. "I don't front."

The older man breaks eye contact and looks beyond Ray at the street. He smiles emptily as he steps back out of their way. "Not on the porch, guys. C'mon inside." The Baron's trying to sound friendly.

Joel steps past the Baron, and Ray follows; the Baron shuts the door behind them and bolts it. They're in what passes for a living room: a tiny cubicle littered with Harley parts and filled to overflowing with mismatched furniture. It's dim after the bright sunshine outside, and Ray blinks a few times as he looks around, letting his eyes get used to the gloom. Something stinks, faintly; there's a rancid odor that wasn't apparent out on the porch, as if they'd penetrated an invisible membrane when they crossed the threshold. Ray's no stranger to bad odors, but he can't quite put his finger on this one.

The Baron gestures them to a couch sagging against the far wall and they sit. Ray perches on his haunches at the edge of the couch cushion, Joel squirms to get comfortable on the other end. The Baron sits on a tall bar stool by the front door opposite them. Ray notices a long bundle wrapped in a wool blanket lying on the floor behind the Baron.

"Your friend says you need something automatic," the Baron says, speaking directly to Ray this time.

Ray nods. "Joel told me you maybe got a Thompson." Joel has the sense to say nothing.

"I do." The Baron stoops and reaches down to pick up the bundle. He hefts it a few times, then folds back one corner of the blanket; the end of a gun barrel peeks out, all blue and shiny. Then, like a strip tease, the Baron slowly peels back the blanket and lets it drop to the floor, revealing the bluntly functional shape of a Thompson submachine gun; it's the good kind, with the old-fashioned fat disk drum magazine hanging down from the action like in an old gangster movie.

"You got the money?" the Baron asks. Ray pulls the wad of bills from his pocket and sets it on the end table next to him. Ray doesn't take his eyes off of the Tommy gun; the Baron isn't pointing it at anyone, and his finger isn't even inside the trigger guard, but Ray squats tensely at the edge of his seat, ready to jump if this is a rip-off.

The Baron doesn't try anything, though: he only stands and brings the Tommy gun over for Ray's inspection. Ray takes it with reverent hands and lays it across his lap; it's heavier than he expected. He detaches the drum magazine and inspects the gun thoroughly, trying not to grimace in disgust. The Tommy gun's filthy, and rusted in places, but fortunately the rust is all only on the surface. It'll take him hours with a toothbrush and about a gallon of cleaning solvent, but he can get it clean again.

Joel and the Baron are making chit-chat, small talk, but Ray doesn't listen. He looks down the barrel: the lands and grooves are half worn away. He figures that's no problem: Tommy guns were never known for accuracy, and in the close quarters of the drug houses he'd be working, he couldn't miss if he tried.

Finally, the full automatic sear, the tiny piece of metal that determined if the Thompson was truly a machine gun. Ray breaks the gun down to reveal the firing mechanism. He works the fire selector control on the side while he looks down into the complex mechanical guts of the Thompson. He swivels the selector from 'Safe' to 'Semi' to 'Auto,' watching the sear. Sure enough, it was a full automatic; the Baron wasn't trying to sell him a "machine gun" that could only fire one round at a time.

Ray leans the gun next to him against the couch and picks up the heavy drum magazine.

He looks down into the well opening on top and his eyes open in disbelief: the magazine is loaded, that's why it weighs so much. He glances up at the Baron, still making small talk with Joel. Ray shrugs after a moment, his face not changing expression after his initial surprise. If the Baron is stupid enough to sell a loaded weapon, that's his lookout; he's just lucky Ray is honest.

He continues his inspection of the loaded magazine: the blunt copper tipped .45 rounds lie next to each other like sleeping hornets, disappearing from view beneath the edge of the opening. Ray pushes gently with his thumb, and the rounds slide over, with a creaking metallic sigh; they return when he releases pressure. The magazine spring was good, then.

The Thompson was a beat up old veteran, but there was still some life in it. All it needed was some TLC from an expert. And Ray was just the guy.

He looks at the Baron. "Okay," Ray says, picking up the wad of bills and handing them over to him. Ray picks up the blanket from the floor and wraps up the tommy gun as the Baron counts his cash.

"All there," the Baron grunts in satisfaction. "This calls for a peace pipe." He looks toward a dark doorway on Joel's end of the couch, leading into the further depths of the house, and calls out hoarsely, "Deb!"

A woman appears in the room with them. She has frizzy blonde hair with black roots, wearing tight jeans and a tube top that leaves her pale midriff bare. It looks like she put her makeup on with a trowel, but that's still not enough to conceal the deep lines in her face from too many years of hard living. She's holding a pipe and a baggy of weed.

She glances once at Joel before staring at Ray; she stands there for several seconds not looking away from him until the Baron shouts at her. "Bring it here, woman!" Deb stares at Ray one long moment more before finally obeying her old man.

The Baron has finished tamping down the bowl, and offers it to Ray. Ray shakes his head; he'd never liked getting stoned, getting out of control in any way. Maybe the Baron wanted everyone to be buddies now that business was concluded, but Ray wants nothing more than to get out of this dump now that he has the Thompson.

Joel leans forward out of the couch, reaching for the pipe. "I'll take that hit," he says, and the Baron grins as he hands over the pipe. Ray curses inwardly, resigning himself to waiting while Joel cops his buzz; they'd come in Joel's car, and Ray wasn't about to walk home carrying an automatic weapon.

Joel hits the bowl, holding his lighter to the weed and sucking it down in a long hissing inhalation before passing it to Deb with a leering smile. "Here you go, babe," he says, voice tight as he holds in his burning lungful of smoke. She takes the pipe, but if she notices Joel's look or hears his words, she doesn't let on; she stares at Ray over the pipe as she inhales, then lets out an explosive series of repressed coughs as she tries to keep her hit in. She passes it on to her old man.

The Baron sits on his stool, tattooed muscles rippling as his chest expands to contain the smoke. He sits for a moment, eyes closed, the smoke trickling dragon-like from his nostrils to frame his skull face in a tracery cloud. Ray hears a furtive rustling from around the corner through the same doorway Deb appeared from. The Baron opens his smoke reddened eyes to look at something back there out of Ray's field of vision. He smiles.

"C'mere, baby," he says, pot smoke billowing from his lips with each word. "Come to daddy."

A baby totters into the room. It's a little girl; she's maybe two years old, with her wispy copper colored hair drawn into two pig tails, one on each side. She's naked except for one of those huge lunar excursion diapers, the kind Ray has seen some mothers leave on their kids for a day and more. She walks unsteadily up to the Baron, her eyes wide in excitement and grinning toothlessly. No one else exists in the room for her; she only has eyes for her daddy.

She comes to a halt directly in front of the Baron and stares adoringly up at him as he smiles back down at her. The Baron takes a deep drag from the pipe, removes it from his mouth, and purses his lips as he leans over and slowly exhales, breathing a thin stream of marijuana smoke into his daughter's face.

Something inside Ray cringes as he watches the little face, eyes half closed, toothless mouth gleaming wetly as she sucks the smoke down, slobbering as if she was nursing at her mama's tit. Ray is suddenly dizzy, there's a roaring in his head and his whole body feels engulfed in a million little electric shocks. Without thinking, he rockets to his feet, the blanket dropping to the floor as he slams the drum magazine into the Tommy gun and works the bolt, chambering the first round. Deb evaporates from the room with cockroach instinct, and Ray finds himself hovering over the Baron, the Tommy gun's barrel poised in his face, ready to rock and roll.

"What is it, man?" he can dimly hear Joel yelling next to him. "What is it?" Ray flicks a red-hazed glance at his partner, dancing nervously to his left. Joel is bouncing up and down like he couldn't decide whether to take a leak or grab Ray and wrestle the gun away from him. Ray waits until he's sure Joel will do neither. Smart, a dim rational part of his brain says silently. Smart boy.

Ray looks back down at the Baron, sitting splay legged on the stool leaning back against the wall, as far away from the insistent muzzle of the Tommy gun as he could get. His sweaty face is gray but carefully blank.

Something slaps against Ray's leg, then again, and he looks down in surprise. The little girl is hitting him, swatting at his pants leg again and again with her pudgy little hand. "Dada!" she screams. "Dada!" She's crying, the sticky tears streaming down her fat red terrified face.

Ray turns abruptly away and picks up the wool blanket with shaking hands. He deliberately keeps his back turned on the Baron as he wraps up the Tommy gun, praying he'd try something. But he doesn't. Then he faces Joel, his hand outstretched. "Give me the fucking keys," he orders.

Joel digs deep in his pocket and produces the keys to the car, eager to please. Ray snatches them from him and stalks to the door, Joel right on his heels. He doesn't look at the Baron as he leaves, but he can feel Deb's eyes burning into his back as he walks out, and he can still hear the baby's anguished wails as he reaches the sidewalk and turns toward where the car's parked. Behind them, somebody quietly shuts the front door and throws the bolt.

Ray walks fast down the sidewalk with Joel bobbing along behind him like a dog on a leash. Neither man says a word until they reach the car, when Ray finally turns to face his friend. "What kind of idiot sells a piece with rounds in it?" His eyes search Joel's face.

Joel won't meet his gaze, his eyes looking now here, now there, anywhere but at Ray. "You been away a long time, man. I got no more connections for that kind of hardware." He looks away, back down the street to the Baron's house. "He was the best I could do."

Ray realizes that's as close to an answer as he's going to get. He nods, gives the keys back to Joel, and they drive the hell away from there.


Michael Hansen returns to the pages of PWG after a previous appearence in the March/April issue with "Speedy's Big Moving Day." A new Speedy story will appear in the September issue.
He writes, "When I was young, my life was a runaway freight rain: I was raised by bikers, and taught the intricacies of the Streets by gypsies & pimps, dealers, gangbangers and Nam vets. I've been a psychic friend, flea market vendor, kick boxer, door-to-door salesman, bouncer, taxi driver & jarhead -- as well as a homeless bum, and other professions less mentionable. Then I met my wife, had my son, and discovered writing (not necessarily in that order) -- now I'm almost functional!"