Firebird by Brandan Foley

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Firebird

fiction by Brandan Foley

For weeks, Travis had ignored the off-color comments hurled at him from the tenured workers playing dominoes at their designated table in the break room. But the long hours of his graveyard shift combined with the soreness from moving crates and sorting through people’s inane packages all day had finally worn him down. A few threats and clenched fists later, Travis found himself with a torn collar and scraped knuckles, staring at a stack of termination papers. “Warehouse Team Member” was the third position he’d lost since his return to polite society early last year, and he dreaded the inevitable phone conversation he’d have to have with his parole officer later.

After a thirty-minute walk home through roadways designed without pedestrians in mind, Travis burst through the front door of his tiny apartment like a bull, sweaty coveralls still sticking to his skin. He tore the work clothes from his body and used his undershirt to wipe the sweat from his neck and brow. Resisting the urge to swat down a stack of envelopes on the kitchen counter, he balled his hands up tightly and pressed them against his hips. In, out, in, out, he told himself. Cool off, man. Collect yourself.

Officer Jodie had been touting Travis’ ability to control his anger and prevent outbursts like this, but coming down from one when it had already started was another story. Travis needed something to focus on, something to put his energy into, and reorganizing Officer Jodie’s talking points for him wasn’t it. Right now there was only one thing on Travis’ mind, the only thing he could think of to funnel his frustration into. He turned on the AC, pulled a non-alcoholic beer from the fridge, and set to work.

Travis scoured every corner of his cramped apartment, overturning furniture and rummaging through disorganized piles of paper and mementos, searching room to room for every last dollar he had hidden from himself. The “retirement fund” he liked to call it. He pulled a roll of hundreds from the cookie-less cookie jar atop the fridge and an assortment of twenties, tens, and fives from a coffee tin in the back of his cupboard. There was a small

wad of cash tucked underneath the TV stand in the living room, and a jar of change on top of the broken bookshelf in his bedroom. With arms full of loose notes and a cold bottle in

hand, he slid open the door to his closet and pulled out the small grey safe from beneath a pile of old unused winter blankets.

Travis pulled the safe up onto the unmade bed in front of him and dropped the rest of his bounty in a shower around it. He punched his parents’ anniversary date into the safe and clicked it open, retrieving an envelope full of hundreds from beneath the gun and his father’s old wedding ring. After counting up the spoils of his meager apartment, Travis closed his eyes and tried to do the mental math, adding up physical bills with the numbers listed on the bank app on his phone, and the hours of labor he knew he was still owed. Fears confirmed, his anger swelled and he threw all of the green paper back down in a messy pile. Still two grand short, at least.

Travis paced the room, first to clear his head, then to fill it up with new ideas, then to chase his thoughts away again. He tried to be deliberate with his breathing, trapped in the spin cycle of a mind muddled with rage and plans cut short. In, out, in, out. What’s the point if I’m already drenched in sweat? He poured the last third of his pseudo-beer down his throat and slammed the bottle down on his nightstand, still wet with condensation. He kicked his boots off at the foot of the bed, letting his feet breathe for the first time all day. Still unconvinced of the breathing exercises taught to him in mandatory anger management classes, he lowered himself to the floor, crossed his legs, closed his eyes, and tried to wrangle his lungs into a regular pattern.

After testing the limits of his patience, he opened his eyes and counted aloud the first five things that came into his line of sight: Boots, bed, money, safe, gun. Gun. His eyes lingered on the object for a long while, half-lulled anxiety still churning in his stomach. His thoughts were desperate – irrational – but the plan he had set in motion had crumbled today, leaving him with only the resources that lay in front of him on the frameless mattress. Travis checked his phone and felt a brief breeze of relief wash over him seeing that Officer Jodie hadn’t tried calling him yet. Eyes locked on the gun, he dialed a number he’d been avoiding ever since he’d been out of prison.

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“Hey, Zo. It’s Travis. Can I buy you lunch tomorrow?”

45 The next day at Peggy’s Diner, Travis ordered a basket of fries and a glass of water. The woman across from him with the green undercut and the bleeding eyeball tattooed on her throat ordered one of those faux fancy skillets, sad strips of overpriced meat atop rice and vegetables; and a “signature” strawberry lemonade to wash it down with.

“Really?” Travis glared at her as the two of them handed their menus to the waitress. Zo made sure to hold on to the dessert menu.

“Come on, Trav,” she always had a playful cheer in her voice, like a teasing older sister. “You’ve been gone for a while, but not so long that you forgot the rules. You know how it goes: You buy lunch, I tell you about the job.”

“Right, okay.” Travis pulled a faded leather wallet from his pocket and plopped it onto the table impatiently. “I’m good for it. What’s the job?”

“Not so fast.” Zo took a long swig of lemonade through a plastic straw, staring Travis down the entire time. Rather than meet her eyes, Travis focused on the eyeball inked into her neck, a nail running vertically through it, wrapped with a banner that read “NEVER SOFT”. Travis already believed the sentiment, but the sudden harshness in her question confirmed it. “I thought you didn’t work with junkies no more?”

“Jesus, Zo,” Travis looked up from the unblinking eye to Zo’s condescending smile. “It ain’t like that, alright? I wasn’t working at all. Went clean after I got out, remember?”

“Mhm,” Zo leaned in, resting her chin on the rim of her glass, “’cept that job you did with Cesar’s crew a few months back. That thrift store down on Clearview Street? I’m sure

your PO would be glad to hear you played well with your peers there.”

“Man, fuck Jodie. I hope that pig’s dead.” Travis bit a fry in half to accentuate his point. His pulse quickened when he finally locked eyes with Zo. “Besides, that wasn’t a job. All I did was watch the door. The payout on that crap shoot would barely cover your lunch.”

“But it is, isn’t it? You’re good for it alright.” She cocked an eyebrow towards the

worn wallet and scoffed. A beat passed before she stirred her drink and continued. “Look, all I’m saying is there’s a reason you’ve got the itch again. You have another run in with Lozuto and his boys? He’s gonna be tough to pay off this time. You hear what happened to his-”

“No, Zo. It’s nothing like that this time.” Travis looked down at his hands as the waitress returned, placing a basket of fries between them. “I’ve got my eye on some real estate.”

The last weekend of every month, Travis would visit his father out on “The Ranch” as his old man called it. The property itself was small, but it was tightly nestled into the edge of a forest, the sliding back door opening up to miles of towering redwoods. Since the divorce, Travis’ relationship with his father was mostly an unspoken one, filled with the background noise of old movies, almost always his father’s choice. Once, when Travis was nine, he was dropped off at the Ranch after a school field trip to the aquarium that left him with a fresh fascination with sharks. That night, the old man put on Jaws and let Travis spout useless facts about cartilage bones and electroreception long into the night.

When he was eleven, Travis’ father gave him his first sip of beer. An eager mouthful of malt was sprayed onto the concrete garage floor moments after the can touched Travis’ lips. The old man turned red and swore – something about staining the paint of the car – and threatened to give Travis the belt. His father threatened him plenty, but almost never followed through with it. Even when his father was angry, Travis was never afraid of him. He knew that if he just kept quiet and gave the old man his space things would blow over. Nights like that, Travis appreciated the quiet songs of the forest beyond his window.

The job Zo outlined over lunch was a relatively simple one, something just the two of them could handle and still walk away with a good take. The night came quickly and Travis was in the passenger seat of Zo’s white Firebird, parked adjacent to the old antique mall she used to lift from in high school. Apparently there was a tall black safe behind the counter that housed a bunch of jewelry, old bank bonds, ivory, who knew? Anything the shop owners wanted to move without having to do any tricky book-keeping was in that safe. How

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47 this joint managed to stay afloat this long was beyond him, but Travis wasn’t here to fret over the store’s bottom line. Zo sat behind the wheel, idly picking vine green polish off her nails, while Travis sat with his eyes closed, breathing slowly. Focus had never been a strong suit of his, but it had been especially difficult the past few years. Meditation helped some, but it could only do so much for him in the few tense moments before a robbery.

“Hello? Earth to Trav. You ready, space cadet?”

Travis turned the gun over in his hands, adjusting his grip bit by bit until it felt comfortable, but it never did.

“Yeah, I’m ready Z.”

Travis opened his eyes just in time to see one of the employees head out the door of the antique shop and walk towards their car. The owner had let his niece leave work early, twenty minutes before close, just as Zo had promised.

“You sure you got this?” Zo asked him without looking up from her nails. “Might be nice to have some backup in there.”

“I’ll be fine,” Travis said, “it’s just the one old dude in there, right?”

“Yeah, you’ll be fine.” Zo said, watching the niece’s car leave the parking lot.

The doors unlocked with a sharp click. Travis took a deep breath and cocked the gun.

“Leave the car running.” Travis said as he shut the door behind him.

Zo yelled back something like “be quick about it”, as if there was any other way to do this sort of thing. He tried to look casual in the short walk to the storefront, a façade put on for an audience of empty parking spaces. For a split second, he forgot the world around him, moving at its own restless pace, and pictured himself at the front door of the Ranch, surrounded by trees, the brass doorknob just out of his grasp. As he reached the double doors of his mark, he took a long breath and exhaled, pausing to watch the thin cloud of cold air leave his lips and disappear into the night. One last time, he thought as he pulled the ski mask over his face. A small silver bell chimed as he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

On Travis’ thirteenth birthday, his father loaded two big black cases into the back of his pickup truck and the two of them went for a drive down one of the backroads through the forest behind the Ranch. As they drove, his father was saying something about how much he’d been looking forward to this day, and though Travis could sense the excitement in his father’s voice, he kept his eyes pointed out the window, following a little roadside stream and wondering if there were any fish in it.

Travis had known this day was coming for a while now. His father kept all his guns in a decorative display case in the living room, and every now and then, when he was especially drunk, the old man would hoist Travis up onto his lap and tell “two-fisted tales” of his time overseas. Travis didn’t remember many of the details, but he remembered the pride the stories were told with, even though they all seemed to end sadly. So when his father parked the truck in front of a roadside shack labeled “Backwoods Firing Range”, Travis was hardly surprised.

“Now listen son,” the old man said as he pulled down the tailgate and clicked open the latches on one of those black cases, “a gun is a tool, no better or no worse than any other tool…”

Travis knew those weren’t really his father’s words, just ones he’d borrowed. But that was okay. Travis could tell the speech was genuine, even if it wasn’t original. His mind was still on the stream they had passed on the way here, wondering if it might lead to a little pond where the two of them could just go fishing instead.

“Hands in the air, now!”

Travis tightened his shaky grip on the gun, trying to keep the barrel level, or at least to keep up a threatening appearance. Not that there’d be much chance of missing at this distance anyway. The man behind the counter was vaguely middle-aged, bespectacled, and was identified by his nametag as “Oscar ☺”. Instead of putting his hands up, per Travis’

request, Oscar flung open the register and began shoving handfuls of cash across the table

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49 towards the bag under Travis’ arm. Travis instinctively opened the bag and pushed the cash inside, before his eyes caught the tall black safe looming over Oscar from behind him.

hand. “Fuck the cash old man. The safe!” Travis pointed over Oscars’ shoulder with his gun

Oscar shoveled two more shaky handfuls of green paper into the bag before looking up at Travis, confused.

“There is plenty of money here, why would you want–”

Travis brought the barrel between Oscar’s eyes.

“I didn’t ask your opinion. The safe, now!”

Through the tunnel vision of the ski mask, Travis watched Oscar stumble back towards the safe, punch in a code on its keypad, and struggle to loosen the large iron turnstile lock on its front. With gritted his teeth Oscar leaned into the lock trying to loosen it. As he watched the man struggle, Travis felt an odd obligation to help him, to expedite this whole process, make it easier on both of them. As Travis watched the shop keep’s hands frantically turn the lock loose, his eyes were drawn to a golden band on Oscar’s finger.

In that moment, the dead time waiting for the safe to swing open, Travis thought of his father, firing round after round of .223 from a flashing barrel of sleek grey steel. He saw clearly the resoluteness of his father’s face, eyes narrowed, focused only on the paper target in front of him. It was a kind of focus that would have done Travis well now, but he knew the sorrow behind his father’s determination. He was reminded of it every time he saw the ring still on his father’s finger, a relic he refused to be rid of, even after the divorce papers were filed and custody was settled. Years after the old man moved all of his things to that lonely shack he called the Ranch, the ring was still on his hand, tilting back bottles and pulling triggers.

Travis never asked his father why he still wore the ring, and mentioning it to his mother would have pointless. Her opinion of her former husband was low enough already. This would only be another gnat in the swarm of reasons why she had pawned off her own ring so long ago.

Travis felt his own fingers tighten around the trigger.

“What exactly were you expecting to find in here?”

The voice of the stranger named Oscar pulled Travis back to the present. He tightened his grip on the bag of loot and scanned the inside of the safe. There was no jewelry inside. No pearl necklaces or carved ivory earrings. It was a gun safe.

BANG!

Travis felt a bite on the top of his right shoulder. It knocked him against a case displaying a collection of old magazines. Travis held his footing and ducked tightly against the counter as he sprinted for the exit. BANG! BANG! Two more shots followed him and Travis couldn’t breathe until her heard the little silver bell chime again.

Tires screeched through the night as Zo’s decaying sports car roared away from the scene, momentum slamming the passenger door shut before Travis could do it himself.

“What the hell was that?” Zo spat, venomous. Left hand holding the steering wheel, she hefted a bag that weighed considerably less than she expected. “There’s no jewelry in here! Did you kill that old guy over a damn cash register close out?”

“He shot me!” was the only comeback Travis could think of.

He could hear Zo’s questions coming at him in rapid succession, but had no answers of his own to throw back. He wanted to spit back at her, scream that there was no fucking jewelry in the safe, but the .32 caliber tunnel carved into the meat above his collar bone was sending him into a panic. The breathing exercises he'd been practicing were much easier to do when the car was idling and his blood was still all inside his body. Now, Zo was pushing the accelerator to the floor and the heat from the Firebird’s dusty old air vents did nothing to cool either of them off.

“You better hope that old fuck got all the hundreds in here at least. I don’t want to see any goddamn ones while I’m counting this shit.”

“Did you not hear that he fucking shot me?”

Zo scoffed at that and through tears Travis saw a smile crack her lips.

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“Yeah. Can’t believe you let the old man get the drop on you.”

Zo spent the whole conversation with her eyes fixed in front of her, as though the road itself was the source of her frustration and she was trying to run it down at every turn. He almost believed her though. Daydreaming during a hold-up almost cost him his life, and there was no way the bag of cash on his held even half the value they expected from the mysterious magical safe from Zo’s youth. If he’d have kept his wits about him, he definitely could’ve handled the situation better, or at least get a shot on Oscar before getting clipped himself. The Ranch would have been his.

With the speed of the getaway car pressing him into his seat and Zo’s furious words banging dully against his ringing ears, Travis had no idea what he was supposed to do next. All he knew for certain was the pain in his shoulder and that Zo had lied to him about the fucking safe. And there was the gun.

“Stop the car.”

His voice was dry and weak, barely audible over the angry roar of the engine. Zo’s foot eased off the accelerator, more from surprise than acquiescence to her passenger’s request. She had spent the entire getaway berating him, now caught off guard by the distance in his response.

“What did you say?” Zo turned to him with hellfire in her eyes, white knuckling the steering wheel. “We’re fleeing a robbery that you botched and you want to stop for air? No. I’m getting us the fuck out of dodge and then finding someone to patch you up.”

Again he believed her; it was a stupid request. But the cabin of the Firebird was closing in on him, a helpless monkey trapped in a rocket headed for an unknown destination, failure already acknowledged and accounted for. Forget escaping the scene of the crime, escaping this moment and its accompanying headspace took precedent. He wrapped his fingers tightly around the gun again and pointed it towards that ever watchful eye on her neck.

“I said stop the fucking car, Zo!”

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Travis was fifteen when his mother died. He moved to the Ranch full time, no longer confined or protected by weekend visits. On the night of her death, the ring was still there on his father’s finger, clinking against a bottle of rum. The old man stood on the porch, wailing into the ancient woodland around him. It was late, and Travis had been ordered to bed hours ago, but he crept out to the top of the staircase where he watched his father’s pain through the sliding glass door. They held each other at arm’s length, the same way their relationship had always been conducted. That night, Travis could feel that distance spreading.

Three years later, the ring was how Travis identified his father’s body, after the old man stepped in front of a train that ran past the closest liquor store to the Ranch. Whether this was an accident or not, Travis would never know. The ring was all that was left of the man now, aside from a few boxes of DVDs and other outdated mementos. There was the Ranch itself of course, but with his father’s will never written, Travis was directed to drearily decorated state offices where unsympathetic conversations of inherited loans and property taxes took place. After all he’d been through, all overworking unpaying jobs and the stupid “get rich quick” schemes from people like Zo, this was the closest Travis had ever come to buying back his inheritance and ridding himself of the red tape that held his grief together.

But that dream was gone now. The Firebird swerved into a narrow alleyway and came to a sudden screeching halt that shook its occupants, bodies impacting against the safety belts that held them in place. Zo put her hands in the air.

“Hey, come on man.” Zo smiled at him in disbelief. “Let’s get you patched up, alright?”

Travis ignored her and stepped out of the car, keeping the gun trained on her the whole time. Zo’s angry voice faded behind him as he headed down the alleyway, followed by the high pitched squeal of her tires. Travis stood in the dark alleyway clutching the gun, hoping he would be able to return it to his safe soon, tucked away with the rest of his father’s things.

He closed his eyes, caught his breath, and opened them again. He counted the first five things he saw: Dumpster, fire escape, rain, puddles… gun. It dawned on him just how stupid it was to keep the gun and leave the sack of money in the car. Zo had sped off, left him here. Surely she saw this as Travis’ failure and the fraction of the money they had managed to get away with as her rightful cut. Travis wondered if she would have to give any of it to Oscar’s niece.

Travis turned back the way he came, hoping desperately to see the Firebird still idling there, ready and waiting to deliver him from his failures. Instead, he was greeted by a blinding flash of red and blue lights.

“Hey! Freeze, punk! Show me your hands!”

Fully aware of the mask he was still wearing and the grip in his fingers, that feeling of helplessness washed over him again. This time there was no point in fighting it. As he lowered himself towards the gravel, Travis focused his thoughts on the Ranch, but only heard sirens and the sounds of the city.

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Detour Ahead (For Billie), Celeste Corzan

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