Cruthers was sitting in his pick-up in the gravel lot outside The House of Spirits, tapping his thumbs on the steering wheel in time with the old Garth Brooks tune on the radio. Friends in low places, indeed. His missus was inside the liquor store, looking for the best deal on a jug of that rosé wine she loved to wash down the drive-thru burgers getting cold in the bag beside him. She was also supposed to grab a chilled sixer of beer for Cruthers. The cheapest. They all tasted the same to him.
The radio had changed over to an ancient Hank Williams number he hadn’t heard in years when Cruthers noticed two guys too young and nervous to purchase booze legally roll out of a muscle car with another kid driving.
They pushed through the store’s door in a way Cruthers understood meant trouble.
He hopped out of his truck with the shining tire iron he kept behind the seat. The muscle car kid shot him a look and laid on his horn to alert his pals. Otherwise Cruthers wouldn’t have taken the tire iron to the kid’s taillights before going inside the store.
But first he leaned in the car’s window. “Get your ass home, son. I better never see you again. You got a knife or gun in here, don’t even try it,” Cruthers said. “I smell shit. You just shit yourself?”
One kid had a gun on the store clerk and Cruthers’ wife on the customer side of the checkout counter. The other kid was behind the counter, attempting to open the small safe large bills went into.
The kid closer to him motioned with his gun hand for Cruthers to join his wife and the store clerk. Before the kid could say a word, Cruthers brought the tire iron down on his thin wrist, hard — sending his gun skating across the linoleum floor and clearly breaking a few of the kid’s bones from the horrified look on his face as he scrambled toward the door cradling his damaged arm.
The kid failing with the safe lock looked more surprised than horrified.
“Let’s everybody calm the fuck down before I do something I’ll regret the rest of my life,” the kid said. “Is that what you’re gonna tell me, mister? That I’ve got my whole life ahead of me?”
“Not me,” Cruthers answered, then looked at his wife biting her bottom lip in fear.
Cruthers flung the tire iron hatchet-style over the kid’s head so it smashed into the wall of pocket bottles behind him. The shattering glass was enough distraction to leap over the counter and tackle the kid to the liquor-soaked rubber floor mat and sit on him until the police arrived.
What happened to this second kid’s gun in the hubub, Cruthers never knew, but the store clerk had the gun the first kid left behind and was on the phone dialing 911 so fast, it didn’t matter.
BIO
Brian Beatty is the author of four poetry collections: Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. His next poetry chapbook, Hobo Radio: Magpies and Crows, is due out from Ravenna Press in 2021. Beatty’s crime stories have appeared in Noir Nation, Shotgun Honey and Switchblade.
