Frank Reilly: A GENTLEMAN • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Frank Reilly
A GENTLEMAN

I used to take the Long Island Railroad out of the city at dusk. Didn’t matter where to. I’d get on before the cars filled up and drop down in one of those booths where there are four seats, two on either side, facing each other. Then it was a roll of the dice. Who was going to sit across from me?

Sometimes I was looking at an angry construction worker brown-bagging a forty. Sometimes it was a college girl with her backpack in her lap, pressed against her chest. Maybe a frazzled mom who needed that space between the seats for a stroller. Everybody.

This is what I did: I just stared. Right at them.

Nothing else. I didn’t talk. No expression. And I didn’t let up.

Then it was on.

Anything could happen.

It was like a shot of adrenaline, every time. Forget coke, forget a mosh pit, forget a firefight in Kandahar, even.

I was twenty-seven. Not a big guy, average, whatever. I’d been running my little train game a little too often, probably, after I came home. It’d been hard finding work and harder keeping it. I was about to lose my apartment because I owed a couple grand in back rent. I didn’t go out because there was no cash coming in, so I straight up needed the connection.

Anyway, with this train thing, most people looked away. They’d peek up every now and then, but when they saw I was still staring, they’d disappear into their phone or a book. Once the train stopped and the doors opened, they were gone.

Sometimes, though, it was a full-on confrontation right off the bat.

“What the hell are you looking at?”

I got dragged out onto the platform and pounded down by this one fine fellow. That happens sometimes when you roll the dice. Another time it was me doing the pounding. That clown called me out too, but he was all bark.

Once it was this older woman, maybe in her mid-forties. She blushed at first, then turned away. Pretty soon, though, she was looking right at me. That ride—what can I say? When you really lock eyes with someone, anyone, for more than a minute? The world changes. Your brain works different. It’s like you’re being fed something better than food. It starts to feel like an out-of-body experience.

We went two stops past where I usually get off to turn around and head home, me and that woman. The car started to empty out but neither of us moved. She got up, finally, and got her things together as the train slowed down to make another stop. Then she gave me this naughty smile.

And that’s all I’ll say because I’m a gentleman.

Another time I sat down across from an Indian woman, like from India, with the dot on her forehead, the bindi. She was tiny, and old enough to be my grandmother. When she looked into my eyes, she deflated—that’s the only word for it—like she saw me coming. She just stared back, resigned.

Gotta say, it started making me uncomfortable. I blinked first, I guess. I looked out the window and tried to focus on whatever was passing by. The same bare trees, over and over, which was hypnotizing. I came to when I felt tapping on my knee. The train was at a dead stop and the old lady was standing in front of me with her coat on as people jockeyed to get off. She looked my way like she was expecting me to follow her, so I did. I’d go into these things with a “yes and” mindset. Like improv. That’s what life is, after all.

When I finally I got out on the platform, she was a ways ahead of me and moving quick.

“Hey!” I yelled out. But she kept motoring.

Every now and then she threw a look over her shoulder. The whole thing was strange enough that I figured I’d best keep my distance, which I did for a solid five blocks. Into a sketchy neighborhood. Overgrown front yards and these tiny Cape Cod homes, one on top of the next, with those steel-reinforced screen doors that don’t let in anything but a breeze. Pretty soon she was standing on the front stoop of one of those houses and holding the door open.

Who’s the spider and who’s the fly? Couldn’t help but think that as I followed her in.

As she moved ahead of me up this long corridor, I called out again. She didn’t respond, but a door opened further up the hall and this kid stepped out, a girl, maybe sixteen. The old woman tried to get into that room, but the girl wouldn’t let her by. Then there was this frantic arm waving between them, like they were having a slap fight or something. I moved toward them to, I don’t know, break it up? When I realized it was sign language. They were just screaming their heads off at each other. The kid had one eye on me, and she was distracted enough that the old woman found her moment and darted past her into the room. The kid’s room, clearly, once I was able to look inside. It was painted sky-blue with posters of rainbows and a boatload of stuffed animals nearly covering the bed.

The old woman pulled a stool up to a bookcase and clambered up on it. She pulled a coffee can with daisies painted on it off a high shelf, and the kid screamed.

“Nooooo!”

Just this heartbreaking wail.

I pulled into the hallway because, are you kidding me? I could get my head blown off right now, I was thinking. Then I heard something hit the floor, which had to be that kid collapsing in grief because I could hear her crying, sobbing. It wasn’t the old woman because she was out of the room and moving toward me at a good clip.

I turned and hauled ass for the front door. I mean, I’d seen some shit after two deployments, but nothing like this.

She caught up to me as I fumbled with the screen door latch, and yanked me toward a rickety hallway table, where she set down that coffee can. She pulled a pad and pen out of a drawer and scribbled out a note. She opened the can, wrapped the note around whatever was inside it, and shoved that wad into my hand. Then she was pushing me toward the front door.

“Please, please,” it sounded like she was saying in this mewling growl. She was crying now, too, and shaking her head.

“Listen,” I said, moron that I am, as she pushed me outside. “Listen,” as she was shutting the door behind me. But not before I heard one more horror-movie-scream “Nooooo!” coming from that kid’s bedroom.

Then I was alone on the stoop, amped up and riding this tremendous high. It was dark by then and the excellent sound of crows rained down on me through the skeletal branches of the trees that lined that shitty street.

I pulled a fat stack of bills—fives, tens, twenties—out of the old woman’s crumpled-up note and read what she had written:

Not all. Rest next week. Please, please, please. We beg you.

I counted out the cash on the train ride home: twenty-two hundred and change. My back rent and then some. And rolled up in the center of all that scratch: a small piece of silver cardstock that was leathery from being over handled—a list of places, also handwritten, but neater, each entry in a different color:

Machu Picchu 3,695

The Colosseum 4,290

Angkor Wat 8,705

Pyramids of Giza 5,615

Taj Mahal 7,430

I used the train ride home to do some digging on my phone. It looked like those numbers were the distance in miles from that kid’s room, out in every direction.

Panjwai is about thirty klicks southwest of Kandahar.

It’s a beautiful place, it truly is, in its way. Dirt roads, dirt homes, the whole place a sandstorm beige. I finished my first tour there in 2014, just as US and NATO forces were winding down operations in Afghanistan—the first time. That was a couple of years after an American soldier stationed there had killed more than a dozen men, women, and children in their homes. The soldier snuck in a few hours before dawn wearing night vision goggles with a traditional Afghan shawl draped over his fatigues. The memory of it hung over everything we did.

We were there to train Afghanis and root out Taliban, but Panjwai was crazy with IEDs, so we rolled with an anti-explosives team and kept an eye out for bomb-making caches. Three times a week, we’d set out from base camp to run patrols. We stood out like sore thumbs, loaded down with weapons and protective gear, watching men in loose-fitting khetpartug and women in burqas scatter when they saw us coming. Everything on the street felt like a threat.

Week after week, I was standing in someone’s doorway playing Good Cop, handing out bottles of Tylenol or these cheap-ass, hand-crank radios HQ loaded us up with, pre-tuned to a local government station, while my crew was busy looking in closets and under beds for jugs of palm oil, pressure plates, battery packs and whatnot. After only a couple of months of being received by frightened locals, I started to baseline. I don’t know whether the adrenaline stopped or if I just got used to it, but at that point I was operating on pure instinct.

Occasionally a wave of nausea would hit me during a search, and that screamed one thing only: This is totally wrong. In which case, we pulled out. On my word. I never got any pushback on that, all the way up the chain. “Our canary in the coal mine,” my CO called me.

Some days we were out working the streets, and I could let my guard down a little. Especially with kids, but only up to a point. Five, six, seven, no big deal. Every year older and there was more to worry about. I’d hand out a few Tootsie Rolls to divert them, but what had been two or three kids would suddenly become seven or eight. Then there’d be a young teen on the outskirts, and he wanted candy, too. But what else? Now I had to worry about all the kids between him and me.

There was this one little chucklehead I started calling the Mayor because he’d pop up half the time no matter where we were. A real schmoozer this kid. Big smile, big personality, maybe ten, eleven. Short with big brown eyes and these tight curls. He’d picked up enough English to weasel his way right in there.

“What is your name? What is your name?” he yelled, smiling, when we first met.

“Mack,” I said.

“Is a beautiful day, Mack, yes?” And that smile again.

Late one afternoon I was standing watch outside an open-air market with PFC Halwell. We were cracking up at the Mayor, who was surrounded by his buddies and jaw-boning something fierce, when the kid looks me dead in the eye.

“Where is home, Mack?” the Mayor asks.

I froze.

I mean, ask me that question any other day and the answer is simple: NYC.

But at that moment, coming from that kid, in that place? It felt like the deepest question anyone could ever think to ask.

Where is home?

He was still staring right at me, and he wouldn’t look away. I couldn’t tell if it was the innocence of youth or the wisdom of the ages looking back at me.

“Come again?” I asked.

Then I saw Halwell sitting in the road a few paces away, with his hand under his belt. The kids all scattered like pigeons. Halwell had been gutted, it turned out. A blade that had to be a foot long, right up under his Kevlar. We got so used to the threat of being blown sky high that a goddamned bread knife wasn’t even on our radar.

Halwell bled out on the drive to the base.

Some canary.

After the train ride home, the first thing I did was drop that cash with my landlord. But I was up most of the night anyway. Too many questions about that girl, the old woman. I made the trip out again early the next morning. Off at the same stop and through the same grove of skeleton trees. My hoodie was up, and I walked past the old woman’s house like any other schmuck on the street. I could hear an argument coming from inside; a man’s voice rising and a higher-pitched response, which had to be that girl.

“What do you want me to do?” the man barked. “What do you want me to say?”

I held up behind a hedge row and watched the front door. The guy came out after a bit. He was tall, dark, thin. Old enough to be the girl’s father. He moved quickly, his shoulders hunched against the cold.

Another “yes and” moment for me—I followed him.

As he made his way down a busy commercial street, he slowed his pace. He was eyeballing an SUV parked in front of a tiny liquor store next to a cosmetics shop.

The driver got out and a guy in an overcoat was stepping down from the SUV’s passenger door just as the girl’s dad walked up to the liquor store with a ring of keys in his hand. Those two big white guys followed the dad inside. I crept up to the door and cupped my hand to the glass. Overcoat walked over to a display case near the register and started knocking bottles over, each of them shattering and pooling red on the floor. The driver must have seen me because he waved off Overcoat, who stepped up to the front window. I pulled myself halfway into the cosmetics place, out of sight.

A lady behind the cosmetics counter gave me a long look as I hovered in the open doorway. The goons next door got right back to business. I could hear pieces of the conversation as their voices started to rise.

“You got your money last night,” the dad said, then the two goons laughing.

“Thinks we’re a couple of idiots.”

“Why are you coming to my home?” the dad pleaded. “You talk to me. Here.”

Then the sound of a scuffle. I turned toward the woman, who looked away. She busied herself with a line of hairbrushes in a display case before glaring up at me, finally.

“In or out, Mister?”

I stepped out on the sidewalk a little after the two goons had left. The driver got in the SUV and took off. Overcoat tucked a manila envelope under his arm as he buttoned up. I trailed him as he made his way down the street. He stopped in at a few other storefronts while I hovered at the curb. As he exited one after another, that envelope of his bulged a little more.

I recognized something in him as he made his rounds. A looseness in his legs as he strolled along, the casual stride of an apex predator. Something behind the yawn he didn’t bother to contain, even as he unbuttoned his coat and ran his hand over the piece he had tucked in a belt holster. I knew the type. There were only two types of people who carried themselves with that kind of ease in Afghanistan: US military brass who were helicoptered into an encampment after an asset had been secured, or your garden variety Afghan warlord. Pick your occupying force.

I should have just gotten out of there. But instead, I followed Overcoat into what had to be the last Five and Dime in the tri-state area.

There was the old-school jingle from a rack of bells slung over the door, the smell of moth balls. A handful of narrow aisles crammed with anything and everything. Fly paper and tea candles. Scotch tape and bar soap. Rat traps and pomade. I smiled at the ancient geezer who was sweeping up and caught sight of Overcoat as he pushed aside a beaded curtain to a room at the far end of the shop.

“Alright, take it easy!” a man yelled.

And there it was again. That queasy feeling. I fought the urge to run out.

Suddenly the rumble of displacement coming from that back room. Boxes falling, maybe, or a table overturned.

If it wasn’t going to be about flight, I’d have to go with fight.

But with what? My eyes landed on a rack of accordion-fold street maps—useless. Maybe the crescent wrench in the shelf bin? That tire iron near the car wax? I ran up the aisle labeled “housewares,” and my options multiplied. Oven mitts and turkey basters. Egg timers and salad tongs. Kitchen knives and soup bowls.

Then pop, pop, pop. Like a string of fireworks, sharp and tinny.

The geezer shuffled toward the noise and was laid flat by Overcoat, who low-shouldered him viciously as he burst out of the back room. The old man’s head hit the linoleum with a sickening thud. A cascade of beads skittered across the floor like light rain as Overcoat lumbered forward. I pulled out of sight as he blew out the door.

The old man was out cold. Not a peep from the back room. My instinct to stay and help was shouted down by a louder voice. Some things require more than repair, it growled. I grabbed what I needed, dropped a twenty on the counter, and made for the door.

Overcoat had turned down a side street. It took a half-block to catch up to him. I slowed my pace and caught my breath.

“Hey Mister,” I called out. “Can I get a little help?”

Overcoat ignored me until he got an eyeful of the street map I was struggling to unfold.

“Are you kidding me with that?”

“I must be turned around,” I said, “I’m looking for Lefferts Avenue.”

The map fluttered in the weak breeze as I worked to secure one side of it. Overcoat let out a disgusted sigh as he grabbed the other edge with his right hand. He found and traced the road we were on with his left hand, squinting to make out the tiny type that ran along it. I reached into my hoodie pocket and took hold of the handle of the kitchen knife.

Then it was up and in. Just like that.

Overcoat went stiff and his eyes widened. His brow was knitted, his mouth locked in a frozen “O.” He didn’t even let go of the map. His left hand was raised in a pointless wave. I pocketed his gun, held his stare and gave him nothing.

I guided him backwards with the blade handle, my free hand on his shoulder. He shuffled along slowly until his back hit the wall of the building behind him. I lowered him onto a standpipe that was waiting there like some ungodly throne.

I pulled the blade out quickly. He dropped his elbows to his knees, cradled his stomach, hung his head. The manila envelope hit the ground beside a gathering pool of blood and I stooped to grab it. He reached out for me slowly, weakening. I took a step back, looked up and down the vacant street, and got out of there. Dropped the knife and his gun down a storm drain on an empty street corner, unlooped the string securing the flap of the envelope and looked inside. It was fat with cash. More than I knew what to do with! A new beginning, maybe. I tried to picture myself somewhere else.

Where is home, Mack?

I passed the liquor store. A sign hung inside the door. “WILL RETURN,” it shouted, an empty clock face—the hands removed—floating beneath it.

Then back to the kid’s house.

A police cruiser was parked out front. Two cops stood inside the screen door, the dad behind them. His hands moved frantically as he translated for the old woman beside him.

I snuck around the side of the house looking for the girl’s room. There was only one window along the wall. It was opened a crack, with a shade drawn over it. I grabbed an empty five-gallon pail from up the driveway, flipped it over and stepped on it to peek inside. It was dark in there, quiet. I pushed the window open enough to climb in, then raised the shade a little to let in some light.

I moved to the bookcase slowly, my eyes adjusting to the dark, and got ahold of that stool. There was a piece of green fabric draped over it. A barista’s apron, it turned out. Pinned up top was a name tag: Prisha. A fat, Sharpie-sketched heart dotted the “i.”

I set the apron aside, climbed up on the stool and got my hands on that coffee can. There were already a few bucks in there, along with a couple of extra Sharpies and a fresh snippet of cardstock—gold this time, with the same places, the same distances listed. All in caps, as if now Prisha was insisting.

I could see well enough to reach into the envelope and count out the cash. I threw in a couple hundred extra, on top of the two-plus-grand I had taken the night before. I was about to drop it in the can when I felt eyes on me. I turned my head.

There on the girl’s bed was that entire zoo of stuffed animals, all of them staring me down. Squirrel, sheep and shark, teddy and toucan, puppy and kitten. An emu, a seagull, and a squid, and in the middle of them all, breath-held and frozen still, a Prisha.

Her eyes, like all the others, were wide and white, with black pupils the size of dimes locked on mine.

The drone of a cop’s voice coming from out in the hallway broke the silence, but not our shared stare. It was like the train game, but at a whole new level.

Scream, Prisha, I thought. Stop this insanity. Please, please, please. I beg you.

But she didn’t.

Our stare went on long enough that we got to that place, the out-of-body place. I knew her for that stare. The sky-blue that surrounded us, painted on her walls, the rainbows, her friends of the forest, they were no escape. This room was Prisha making a shit situation work. It was all there in her eyes. She would not be denied.

I had her money clutched in my hand. Then I thought better of it.

I dropped it back in the envelope along with the rest of the cash. I tossed it all to her on the bed. It landed snuggly between kitten and shark. Prisha didn’t move a muscle.

I reached into the coffee can and pulled out a Sharpie. At the bottom of her cardstock list, I wrote:

Panjwai 6,800

I know the distance. I walk those miles every day.

I dropped the cardstock in the coffee can, climbed down off the stool, and crawled out the window, back into the blinding light.

When she gets to Panjwai, Prisha will meet the Mayor. He’ll be around her age. She’ll be a better ambassador than I ever could be. They’ll fall in love, raise a family, I’m sure of it. A huge family filled with happy and healthy kids who will spread out around the globe, an appropriate occupying force. They’ll knock on the doors of locals with empty hands, smiling.

“Is a beautiful day, yes?” they’ll say.

Frank’s work can be found in The Baltimore Review, Zone 3, and Kauai Backstory, among others. He’s gotten a distinguished story nod in the 2024 Best American Short Stories anthology, had a story recorded live for the public radio program & podcast Selected Shorts, and received a Best Screenplay award at the Austin Film Festival. He lives in Portland, Oregon. See more at www.thefrankreilly.com.