ROUNDS OF KEVIN BACON
“Kevin Bacon?”
“Yes, that’s the game.”
“Then Footloose.”
“No, then it’s somebody from Footloose, like Lorri Singer. John Lithgow. And so on,” says the waitress to me.
“I’m not good at that sort of thing,” I tell her.
She sighs. “Regardless. My point isn’t about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, it’s about the whole concept of degrees. Interconnectedness to certain people or events. For example, I tend to doubt that a single person is more than one or two degrees tops from an act of gun violence.”
The waitress talks over the faucet she puts on behind the Chili’s bar. A red light glowing above our heads illuminates variously shaped wine and cocktail glasses dangling from the cabinet lips encircling the kitchen-side eating area. She drops a few used ones into the sink, watches them float in bubbly dirty water. We recognized each other when I first entered the restaurant, but I don’t think either of us can really say from where. She’d begun speaking to me familiarly, without using my name. But when she turns to me—I gotta say, I can’t help it—my eyes keep shifting up to that pyramid on her forehead. Yes, it’s explicit. Dense. I can’t stop looking at it, those three perfect moles perfectly shaping some illuminati trinity.
“That’s a strange comparison,” I manage to say, still distracted by her scalp. “That isn’t really provable anyway.”
“I guess not,” she sighs again.
“Why are you even bringing this up?” I ask.
Before she can answer, somebody comes around the from kitchen area behind the wall—a tall boy with a visor cap and spiderlike arms—and sidles up beside me, glancing down a receipt in one hand and producing, almost magically from I-don’t-know-where in the dim near-empty place, a plastic tray of quesadillas. It topples slightly when he drops it onto the bar top, and I can tell already it will be lukewarm. Soggy and lukewarm.
“Because I’m tired of people coming through,” the waitress tells me once the boy leaves, “just to get a chance that big churchy tent they put up in the parking lot. It’s a gun show, I know it. Everybody knows it, even if they don’t say as much on the signs. We can all tell that folks are coming through just to buy semis, rifles, handguns—quickly and cheaply. So what’d you get?”
“That’s not really important,” I reply grumpily. “Or your business.” One of the french fries I’ve been given breaks apart when I dip it into a ketchup dish, so I pour the condiment out across the plastic tray. It sops, gradually, over the tray.
“What’d you get a gun for, anyway?” she asks as that triangle glistens over her eyeline.
Maybe we recognize each other from high school. Or summer camp as kids. But I don’t remember that forehead triangle.
“Protection.”
“Don’t people say you’re more likely to die by homicide when you own a gun?” the waitress tells me. “And blah blah blah.” I look up at her, startled. She couldn’t really be saying blah blah blah. No, I must be zoning out a bit. I hear these words, the same old words that people say all the time. Meaningless words, really. I have forgotten her for a second, because the tray of food before me is appallingly pathetic—not sizzling, nor fried, nor anything. Somebody in the back probably tossed it under a heat lamp after plucking it from a frozen plastic bag only moments ago.
“Protection,” I repeat haphazardly, my mind unfortunately hazy. “So I’m not the one getting shot.”
“Hmm.”
“I had a dream the other night,” I begin. “One you might find interesting. In it, I had been watching the news on TV, and all those faces—you know, the ones they put up whenever they talk about murders, rapes, armed robberies, knife attacks, zombie druggies—kept appearing at my door. Lining up. As if one by one they were waiting in line to destroy me and my soul. I felt like I’d just seen a ghost, when I woke up. Or been given some sort of vision. Especially considering how the world is now. More and more violence, more and more faces popping up on the news. So I decided right then that I didn’t want to be a victim, or a criminal. I just wanted to survive.”
“You’ve been watching too much TV, I think,” replies the waitress after a time-stopped moment. Yet her voice, I notice, is changed. Somehow shaken. Frightened. My words have hit some target, which is probably triggering her back into her mind where the rounds of Kevin Bacon continue to play off. The River Wild. Meryl Streep.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I cut in, before the waitress with the illuminati forehead can say anything else. She goes away. Upset, but silent.
***
My car is parked around the back. I toss my leftovers in through the open passenger window and set down my bag from the gun show on its hood. I have no idea why I asked for leftovers anyway, since I couldn’t finish the soggy quesadillas there, and I definitely won’t eat them at home. In the gun-show bag is a cardboard box, inside of which sits the sturdy form of a six-piece revolver. It’s a beautiful-looking gun, I’m not ashamed to say so. Looks like it would go well in a movie, like some western or even a detective flick from the 80s.
The ammo feels cold. Heavy. Slick. One by one I slip the bullets into the six casings, one by one. I spin it and it rattles—the cylinder. After a moment, I replace the piece to its cardboard box. I glance off to the woods from which this Chili’s parking lot lets off—out of the glare of streetlamps and the yellow glow of that bulb keeping watch over the trash bin—and I imagine my gun going off in the direction of the trees. I imagine flying with it in my mind until it strikes something. Would it be a tree? Or would it keep going until it came across an animal? Living flesh? It’s a weird fantasy—maybe granted me only because of the loaded gun beside me—but I imagine the bullet soaring in silent grace until it’s circled the earth a few times, then the atmosphere, then space.
But then, from out of nowhere, a wild deer just comes up to me and asks me for a light. It walks exactly like me, but looks like a deer. Two beady eyes peer out from a wild face, neatly combed fur, and a pair of stubby antlers. It’s got on a blank t-shirt and jeans. And when I tell it to get lost, the deer shrugs, and says, “Only asking. No harm in that.” Then waddles toward the nearby road, onto the sidewalk, and off toward some other casual dining chain.
I don’t know why I think about some of the things I do.
In the car on the drive home, I unbox the gun, because I’m stopped at a red light, and it’s just sitting there, boxed. It reminds me how heavy it is when I lift it. But that’s good; heavy is strong. Heavy is power. Light doesn’t matter if you have heavy. For the rest of my trip I leave the exposed metal on my lap, feeling its weight over my thighs. Heavy is good.
***
My apartment complex has a red awning over the lobby door and an ugly fire escape clinging to its brick side. As a kid I was fascinated by fire escapes because they reminded me of the city—and anytime I’d see one, I would try to jump up and grab it. We were always jumping as kids. Trying to prove how high we could go, maybe. Or just because we weren’t sure if our legs would someday grow stiff like our parents and their parents’ legs and we would end up stuck somewhere unsavory. Glum.
But on this apartment, the fire escape simply looks like a rusted, shabby eyesore. They spend all this money on redoing the lobby, with new marble benches by the front desk, a new voice on the elevator speaker, signs pointing you toward the mail boxes and the stairwell behind the office. Yet you still have to put your shoulder into the door just to get it open. You have to do that all the time in this building, whether it’s the lobby door or your own door.
Just as I shoulder the lobby door open, I look and to my surprise, it is not the usual concierge waiting at the front desk but the taxidermy head of an antlered deer. Taxidermy. Or so it appears. Stepping further into the pale bright lobby with the marble and the mail box signs, I notice the antlered deer head turn, smile at me, and nod.
I can feel the revolver bounce against my leg from my pants pocket as I hurry—each step a steady lunge—toward the stairway. Either this is some practical joke, or the waitress with the illuminati forehead poisoned me. But no. She didn’t serve me the food; it was the boy in the visor cap who brought out the food, and he had no reason to do anything to me or my food. Unless the quesadillas are just bad. I remind myself to toss the leftovers bag into the trash as I shoulder open the stairway door and begin up toward my fourth-floor apartment.
Nobody’s taking the stairs—nobody ever does—but I can’t help imagining another deer just waiting behind the door to each storied hallway. A tall one. A short, fat one. One with long antlers. Short stubs on its head. No antlers. Bambi. Little white tails. Each deer going through my head, again and again. Is my heart racing or the thumps of my feet heavily slamming against each step. I’ve been told many times that I walk heavily, especially on the stairs. But here, I’ve busted through the fourth-floor door and stumbled into an empty hallway, the carpet a modern series of shapes jutting and sidling off in both directions until at one end it comes upon a wall and a tiny glass window. The moon is not visible through the window, because it must be coming up in the other direction, but it is full—I can remember that from the drive home.
I am running now, passing the indistinguishable apartments until I reach my own. Barely taking a moment to stick the key in and push. But nothing happens. As usual, nothing happens and the door doesn’t budge. So I put my shoulder into it. Then I am inside, looking through the darkness at a hallway with photos on the walls of people I don’t know and a lampstand in the wrong place. I blink for a moment, before the lights click on, and a figure jumps into view holding what looks like my own revolver in two sweaty trembling hands. I remember counting, but don’t know for sure if it was one or three times that they pulled the trigger.
***
“You shot me,” I shout over the ringing in my ears. But the figure standing above me is also only a deer. As it begins fiddling with a cellphone it had just pulled from the nearby counter, I can hear a sullen voice mutter something about staying where I am—like I would move in this condition—and dialing 9-1-1 and such. A panicked script. Tempted, I consider glancing down at my bleeding body to see the damage done, lifting my wriggling arm into view. But how could I? What in God’s name would I do if I looked at last and saw that I too am one of them? A deer.
Joey Hedger is the author of a fiction chapbook, In the Line of a Hurricane, We Wait (Red Bird 2019). His recent publications include fiction in EcoTheo Review, Maudlin House, and Breakwater Review, and his poetry won first prize at the 2019 Florida Loquat Literary Festival. He currently works as associate editor at an education association in Washington, DC.