Fuck the Rules Page 3

  *

  They got their answer two days later in the middle of breakfast.

  Harold was skimming the Sports section of the newspaper and Lily was pouring a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice when someone pounded on the front door. Harold jumped in his seat. Lily squealed and dropped the half-filled glass onto the kitchen floor, where it shattered into dozens of sticky pieces.

  “What the hell was that?” Harold asked, getting up from the table and heading for the front door.

  Lily tip-toed around the mess on the floor. “Wait for me.”

  Once they reached the foyer, Harold leaned close to the door and looked out the peep-hole. He started to unlock the deadbolt and Lily stopped him. “Be careful.”

  “It’s okay, there’s no one out there.” He opened the door.

  The front porch was empty.

  He walked out and looked in both directions. A dog was barking somewhere down the street, but there was no one in sight.

  “Honey…”

  Harold turned to find Lily standing behind him on the porch. She was pointing to a pink slip of paper fluttering in the morning breeze. Someone had used a hammer to nail it into the door just above the peep-hole. The carved wood around the paper was dented and scarred.

  Harold ripped the note off the door and read aloud:

  “‘Reminder: remit payment within 72 hours of this notice or your fine will be doubled.’” He stared at the pink-slip for a moment, and then handed it to his wife. “I guess we got our answer. Check it out.”

  Lily read the handwriting at the bottom of the note. “We have nothing to talk about, Mr. Anderson. Pay the fine or suffer the consequences. Jesus.”

  “I don’t think Jesus wrote that,” Harold said.

  Lily gave him a look and Harold lowered his head. She stepped back into the foyer and reappeared a few seconds later with the car keys in her hand.

  “Where are you going?” Harold asked.

  “We’re going to the post office.” She headed for her car in the driveway. “Get in.”

  *

  Lily braked hard at a red light and looked in the rearview mirror. “I don’t think anyone is following us.”

  “Following us?” Harold glanced back over his shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

  The light turned green and Lily hit the gas. “There was a black truck behind us for awhile. I thought it might be tailing us.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little paranoid?”

  “Someone just hammered a fucking nail into our front door, Harold. I don’t think much of anything qualifies as paranoid anymore.”

  “Slow down, honey.”

  Lily hit the horn and swerved around a red Jeep. The teenaged girl behind the wheel stuck her arm out the window and flicked them the bird.

  “Please slow down.”

  The traffic light ahead turned yellow. They had plenty of time to stop, but instead Lily accelerated through the intersection.

  “And you just ran a red light.”

  “I’ve had enough of their bullshit.”

  Harold braced his hand against the dashboard as they changed lanes again and bounced through the next intersection. “And I think we just got air.”

  Two blocks later, Lily finally slowed and swung into the post office parking lot. She turned off the engine and reached into the back seat for her purse. She pulled out a black magic marker and an envelope.

  “C’mon,” she said, climbing out of the car.

  “What are you gonna do?” Harold asked, following behind her like a puppy.

  “You’ll see.”

  They walked inside to one of the tall packing tables. She uncapped the magic marker and scrawled the P.O. Box address on the front of the envelope. Then she printed along the bottom of the pink slip of paper in big capital letters:

  FUCK YOU AND YOUR STUPID FINE!

  &

  FUCK YOU AND YOUR STUPID RULES!

  “Lil, honey, you think that’s a good idea?”

  Lily ignored him. She folded the slip of pink paper and stuffed it inside the envelope and sealed it. She walked over to the stamp vending machine and inserted a handful of coins. The machine spat out a single stamp, which Lily licked and affixed to the top right corner of the envelope. Then, she dropped it into the mail slot and turned around and left. They drove home in silence.

  *

  “Wine or lemonade?”

  Harold looked up from the magazine he was reading and smiled. “Lemonade, please.”

  “Coming right up.” Lily poked her head back inside the house, leaving Harold alone on the back deck.

  The last couple days had been strained between the two of them and Harold didn’t even fully understand why. He knew it had something to do with the damn homeowner’s association, but he didn’t know what he had done wrong. In the end, he’d decided to leave the final decision up to Lily: write a check or call a lawyer. She had until tomorrow to decide.

  He’d been surprised and relieved earlier this evening when Lily had greeted him at the door after work with a hug and a kiss. They’d both been relaxed and talkative during dinner, and he was hopeful that they were out of their funk for good.

  “Here you go.” Lily walked onto the deck and handed him a tall ice-filled glass.

  “Thanks, honey.”

  She sat down in the chair next to him and sipped from her own lemonade. “It’s so pretty out here in the evenings.”

  “You just missed a bunch of deer down by the tree-line.”

  “Any babies?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Last night, there was a whole family down there.”

  Harold lifted his glass and took a drink. “Ahh, that’s good.”

  “What do you think about a vegetable garden next spring?”

  “I think vegetable gardens are a lot of work…” He saw the disappointed look on Lily’s face. “…but I think we should do it. It’ll be fun.”

  Lily rested her head on Harold’s shoulder. They sat there and watched the sun drop below the horizon, and then they went inside and straight to bed.

  *

  Harold finished drying off and tossed his wet towel over the shower door. “Well, that was pretty spectacular, if I do say so myself.”

  Lily smiled at her husband through a mouthful of toothpaste.

  Harold couldn’t remember the last time they had started making love in bed and finished up in the shower. Things were definitely looking up. He scooted past his wife and walked naked into the bedroom.

  “Honey, do you know where the Tylenol is?” Lily walked out of the bathroom wearing only her robe. It was untied at the waist and Harold could see her wet skin glistening. He felt himself stir again.

  “Hang on.” Harold searched the cluttered mess on top of the dresser until he found a bottle of Tylenol. He handed it to her. “Headache?”

  She grimaced. “Bad one.”

  “Maybe it was all that screaming you just did.”

  “Ha ha, funny.”

  Lily took a bottle of water from the nightstand and swallowed three of the pills. She crawled into bed and pulled the covers up to her chest. Her head was pounding and she was starting to feel nauseous. She closed her eyes.

  Harold climbed in next to her and turned off the light. “I love you, Lily.”

  Softly, from the darkness beside him: “Love you more, baby.”

  *

  A short time later, the sound of Lily vomiting woke Harold. He sat up to help her and was immediately struck by a wave of nausea and dizziness. His vision blurred and his head felt like it had been set on fire. He looked over at his wife. She was struggling to lift herself out of a puddle of vomit. Her eyes were wide and helpless. He tried to reach out to her, but his arm wouldn’t work. His head slumped back onto his pillow. He lay there in agony and watched his wife die. A few minutes later, he joined her.

  *

  A lone ambulance cruised down Hanson Road, dark and silent, like a shark prowling night waters.
It backed into the driveway of 1920 and cut the engine. Two men got out and were met at the front door by a tall, dark figure. They talked for a moment, and the two men wheeled a stretcher into the house.

  A short time later, they reappeared with a body on the stretcher. They loaded it into the rear of the ambulance, its back doors yawning open like a hungry mouth, and then returned to the house with the empty stretcher.

  A few minutes later, they reappeared again, wheeling another body. They loaded it into the ambulance and closed the doors and drove away.

  Not long after that, the front door of 1920 Hanson Road opened and the dark figure emerged. He crossed the front lawn and started slowly walking down the center of the street until the night swallowed him.

  *

  Chuck Noonan stood on the sidewalk the next morning and stared across the street at 1920 Hanson Road. All the windows along the front of the house were open, the curtains billowing in the July breeze.

  Chuck was about to go back inside to watch the rest of Good Morning America – Garth Brooks was a guest today and Chuck wanted to hear him sing his new single – when a car slowed and pulled to the curb beside him.

  “Morning, Mrs. Cavanaugh. How you feeling these days?”

  “Oh, fair to middling, fair to middling.” She glanced at the house across the street and frowned. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?”

  Chuck thought about poker night with a bunch of rich accountants and nodded his head. “That it is, Mrs. Cavanaugh.”

  “Carbon monoxide again?”

  “That’s the look of it.”

  “Wonder who will move in next?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Well, have a lovely day, Mr. Noonan. Time to tend to my roses.”

  “You, too. Don’t stay out in this sun for too long.”

  Mrs. Cavanaugh waved goodbye and drove away. Chuck Noonan watched her pull into her driveway, and then headed back inside, hoping he hadn’t missed Garth Brooks.

  No Thanks

  Antonio Simon, Jr.

  What’s real is all in your head, and in everyone else’s heads, and somewhere in between, and somewhere outside all that too.

  I woke up that morning expecting it to be the best day of my life. In a way it was. It was my birthday. And the best gift of all was the look on my boss’s face when his eyes crossed the barrel of the M249 belt-fed machine gun in my arms.

  The elevator cab opened onto the second-floor cubicle bank where I worked just as he was walking past the door. His mouth twisted into a scowl, no doubt ready to chastise me for being two hours late to work, when suddenly his jaw dropped and his eyes went glassy.

  “You’re fired, Mr. Watterson,” I said, opening up on the egg-headed prick, though I didn’t hear any of it. What I’d said was drowned out by the big gun roaring to life.

  I’ll admit, that line was corny, but I was caught up in the moment, and that was the best I could come up with.

  The papers in Mr. Watterson’s grasp flipped up into the air as bullets plowed into the greasy old fucker at a hundred rounds a minute. His body frayed away into a fine red mist, jerking and dancing like a marionette at a puppet show put on by Parkinson’s patients. Chunks flew off of him in grapefruit-sized bursts, and to my adrenaline-soaked mind, it looked like celebratory red fireworks for stickin’ it to the man. I smiled in spite of myself, then grinned wider to show teeth, and before I knew it, I was cackling with the back of my head pinned to my shoulders as the gun riddled him with holes.

  Watterson slumped to the ground in pieces, his torso flopped over in a lake of blood at my feet and his severed arm and head resting beside the fake potted shrub beneath the elevator call button. The office was eerily quiet. No one dared show their face, not after that spectacular entrance.

  Most days, you could tell who was at their desks because the cubicle walls only rose to shoulder height. Everybody must have either called in sick, or they were ducking behind the plastic partitions – except for Sharon. That bitch was surely dead. Her cubicle was the first one from the elevator, in a direct line of fire when I unloaded on Watterson. The sheer volume of blood oozing from underneath her cubicle told me she’d been sufficiently ventilated.

  The clock on the wall read 11:12. Would you look at that, I remember thinking. Two Great Lakes before noon – Lake Watterson and Lake Sharon. Still, it was no time to dawdle, as I had my work cut out for me. I’d set my sights higher still, and wouldn’t settle for lakes when what I wanted was an ocean.

  Ah, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. It bears explaining how I got to that point. I could not have gotten so far without first learning three universal truths.

  First: reality is subjective.

  Second: the most powerful words in the universe are “no thanks.”

  And third: applying both of these principles can get you anything you want.

  Some old Greek philosopher with a beard and smelly toga once said that if you had a lever and a place to stand, you could move the Earth. He was right, but what he didn’t know was the breadth of that statement. Reality will bend if you lean on it hard enough. There are limits, of course. You can’t no thanks a refusal, and it won’t work on another no thanks, even when they’re your own. Even the universe hates double negatives.

  Man, what a blast I’d had no thanksing shit. First thing I did was go to the stack of bills sitting on the folding tray I use for a dining table and no thanksed the first one I snapped up. Next thing I knew, my phone rang. It was a lady from accounts receivable at the power company. She said they’d sent a bill in error, and to disregard it when it arrived.

  Poof! Just like that, I didn’t owe anyone anything. All my accounts were paid in full for the month – I didn’t know with whose money, and didn’t care so long as it wasn’t mine.

  Fridge almost out of beer? No thanks. I look under the sink and there’s a full six-pack.

  Bank account overdrawn? No thanks. A bank statement arrives in the mail showing my paycheck has just been direct-deposited. Now there’s a week’s pay where before there was a negative thirty-two fifty. I could never figure a way to no thanks myself an instant million, but I figured I didn’t need to – I had my salary, and if I could no thanks my expenses away, then the money from work would only pile up.

  Starting that same day, I went on a tear. I helped myself to two steak dinners in one night at the swankiest place in town. The bill came out to three hundred dollars. I added a five-hundred-dollar tip and charged it all to my credit card, a smile playing on my face as I signed the ticket, knowing I could no thanks my way out of paying. When the waiter came back, I handed him back the server book with a gracious no thanks. The maitre‘d and the chef themselves even came to my table to personally thank me for dining with them.

  Afterward, I walked into a high-end dealership and no thanksed myself into a brand-new Corvette convertible. I didn’t pay attention to the salespeople or their forms and just signed everything, knowing these were just frivolities – I’d take the keys and drive off, and no thanks away the payments.

  Man, was that car fast! You should have seen how flummoxed the cop was who clocked me running seventy in a school zone during dismissal hour. That would surely have landed me in the slammer, but I no thanksed my way out of that too. He ended up just writing me a ticket, and with a smile and a no thanks, I signed his citation and went about my day.

  What I could never manage was no thanksing myself into getting laid. No really does mean no – it’s a universal rule – and no thanks doesn’t work on double negatives, remember? But where that fell short, the car and fancy dinners worked wonders.

  I took a few days off from my job without telling anyone. That prick Watterson called me at the close of the first day to scream at me for missing work. He threatened to fire me; I no thanksed him. His tone didn’t so much change as it just seemed to drop from rabid anger to simmering annoyance.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he groused before hanging up the phone.
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  No thanks, Watterson. I didn’t roll into the office until the middle of the following week.

  It was business as usual for the next few days. When I got to work after my time off, everyone congratulated me on my hot new car, many asking how I could afford it. Watterson even went so far as to insinuate I was dealing drugs, that sarcastic asshole. I declined to answer their questions with a polite no thanks and settled into my cubicle to knock out the stacks of paperwork that had multiplied in my absence.

  About two weeks in is when I started on some more esoteric shit. I got home and popped a VHS into the TV. It was an old spy film from the sixties, one where a tuxedoed British agent took out the entire red army with his proclivities for bedding women. I fast-forwarded it to the scene where he faced off against a female assassin. I knew how this scene would play out – I’d watched the film a dozen times. But even if you didn’t know the film as well as I do, you could probably guess how it’d go: the bulletproof spy always got the girl to see the errors of her ways, often by spreading her legs.

  I paused the film at the climax of their fight. Frozen on the screen was the spy with the Russian bombshell in his arms as she fought to wriggle free of him. A moment from now they’d be kissing, and then it’d fade out to black, fade in to them both half naked, smoking cigarettes in bed.

  I fired off a no thanks at the TV before hitting play again. What came next floored me. As the guy leaned in for the kiss that would undoubtedly convince her to defect from Mother Russia following some steamy bedroom business, the gal leapt on the balls of her feet, ramming her knee into his crotch. His arms flapped off her, flying to cradle his mashed gonads as he dropped to his knees, then collapsed onto his face. The assassin drew her pistol and fired twice into the back of his skull with practiced efficiency.

  “Do svidaniya,” she grunted, brushing an errant strand of raven black hair from her face. She lit a celebratory cigarette and smoked it, her face impassive as she jetted plumes of smoke from her nostrils.