“Trucks and Tanks” – a short story by Howard Mandel

“Trucks and Tanks” was a short-listed entry in our recently concluded 69th Short Fiction Contest, and is published with the consent of the author.

___

photo by Joe Maita

Trucks and Tanks

by Howard Mandel

…..Trucks and tanks rolled down our leafy-treed, bungalow-lined street at dawn. I was already up, as usual, in my robe, t-shirt, sweaty sweats and slippers, mug of coffee in hand, and had a view standing at our picture window. The armored vehicles shook the pavement. I wondered how many neighbors were awakened by the rumblings.

…..There was a guy across the street in a watch cap and puffy jacket walking his dog. He was watching the dinosaur parade. I don’t know if he saw me. I lowered the blinds gradually, to keep from attracting attention. The guy’s dog pulled on its leash to get to grass near a bush, where it hunched up and shat.

…..The trucks led, with heavy scoops plowing the parked cars over the gutters, onto the parkway lawns and pavement. Some of the cars crashed into trees, knocking down old oaks and maples, bending saplings. The guy with the dog tugged its leash hard, it came to his side, he turned with it and disappeared into the breezeway between two homes.

…..The tanks behind those first three or four trucks had swiveling turrets from which protruded long dull metal barrels that swung in every direction, guided I guessed from within. But maybe not, they could have been remote-controlled. They knocked down hanging limbs of the trees still standing.

…..The dinosaurs didn’t hurry, they lumbered. One of them, in the middle of the pack, seemed to be having a fit of indigestion. Maybe its turret was stuck. It stopped rolling forward. The grinding of its shifting gears fouled the air, rattled the picture windowpane in its frame.

…..The tank burped backwards a few feet, then forward, and again, its version of rocking. It belched a spurt of gas. With another gear-shift, it began rocking side to side, unevenly, turret jerking loose and gun barrel wobbling freely so it hit another oak branch, sending it through the windshield of an already dented old Pontiac.

…..Two joggers in identical outfits — running shoes, Spandex, ponytails poking through the back of their baseball caps — rounded the corner mid-chat, halted awkwardly as they looked down our street and turned back right away. A car entered the intersection (I could see just that far through the blinds’ slats), braked for an instant, then sped off.

…..I could hear in the distance, beyond the rooftops of the houses across the street, pops sounding like clapped paper bags. One or two from different directions, at first, then speckles of them, and higher, faster splashes, firecrackers of various sizes and powers, still a ways off from my place, maybe on the other side of the four-square block park, which I bet is where the trucks and tanks had launched from. Though how did they get there? From our armory, or where?

…..A few soldiers followed the trucks and tanks, walking cautiously, spread out unevenly, in camo and helmets, guns unslung, carried low across their bellies. They weren’t scouts. The trucks and tanks coming first had created chaos and probably fear. The soldiers were for cleanup. Not of the damage the trucks and tanks caused, but of the attitudes and anger they’d incited.

…..The soldiers peered towards the front doors of every house they passed, most of which were up a few steps, with their own paths from the front sidewalks, lawns and garden beds. The soldiers in the middle of the street looked up at our rooflines. There was nothing up there but birds, dormers, chimneys, but they looked.

…..“John-John! What’s that?” Maw called from her bedroom. “Are they bringing my check?”

…..“Not yet, Maw.”

…..“Get my oatmeal,” she commanded. “John-John, you hear me?”

…..I walked down the hall to the kitchen, fussed around with the microwave to heat her cereal, listening and with an eye for what was happening out the back window. It looked out past our yard and garage to the alley behind us, between the garages, yards and houses on the street parallel.

…..A cluster of people, looked like mostly kids, ran past. My sightline wasn’t good, I couldn’t tell how many, but recognized a couple of the young ones by their winter coats. One in particular. And I knew who he ran with.

…..“Here, Maw.” I went into her room. She had slept in her wheelchair. I set her bowl of mush on the table fixed to it, tied a bib around her neck taking care not to kink her air hose, put the spoon in her good hand and went back to the kitchen. I opened our back porch backdoor and stepped out on the wooden landing.

…..There was soot in the air. I clambered up on the landing’s handrail — carefully, ’cause I wasn’t sure it would hold my weight — for a view. It looked like fires had been started in metal garbage cans at both ends of our alley. Black smoke was billowing from them.

…..The soldiers may have been ours, but they weren’t from here. They wouldn’t know how we use the gangways and backyards for shortcuts. I didn’t see them rushing to stop the flames — did they intend to burn us down? No, they hadn’t started the fires. Maybe they didn’t dare come back here, not knowing what they would find. Or maybe they would storm the alleys in another sweep.

…..Who knows what they were looking for? Not me.

…..I went inside and to the front of the house again, to peek out through the blinds. The soldiers looked young and scared. They were bent under backpacks and girded with tool belts. At some command in their earpieces, they simultaneously all at once snapped to. They spread out like just-hatched spiders, in pairs, heading to the houses. In a moment one was knocking on my door.

…..I saw through its side panes that he was very young and scared, but his gear from thick boots to hard helmet and the gun, of course, lent him authority. At least in theory. There were a couple stripes on his shoulder and a patch in the shape of the next state over.

…..He pounded again. His second was not paying attention, instead facing the street that the tanks and trucks had now gone on from, and carelessly (nervously?) lit a cigarette. I opened up. The soldier on my threshold stepped forward, came in.

…..But in my front room he didn’t know what to do. Though, like I said, young and scared — and small, not my height, not my bulk — he was out of proportion in the room. It’s small and not cluttered. There’s a stuffed chair where I read, a lamp behind it, a table beside it, and a desk with a straight chair facing at a big dark screen. But it was like the soldier was wearing seven-league boots and pumped up with energy he couldn’t quite handle.

…..“Did someone come in? Did they bring my check?” Maw cackled. If you weren’t used to her voice, you probably couldn’t make that out. I could, but the soldier looked startled.

…..“Who you got here? How many?”

…..“My maw,” I said. “That’s all. Don’t worry, she can’t . . .”

…..She wheeled herself out just then, through the thick plastic sheets hanging at the hallway’s arch. Her head bent to her left, almost to her shoulder. She sucked oxygen from the hose from the tank strapped to the back of her chair. Her hair was done up ugly, in wispy reddish curls, her lips crayoned like dried blood. She batted her eyelids with an effort, like they were stuck together.

…..“You brought my check?” she asked the soldier. “If you didn’t, how we gonna eat, I ask you? I gotta feed my boy. He works so hard — don’t you, John-John? He works for me. He takes care of me, good care of me.” Suck, suck. He probably didn’t understand any of that, but maybe he got the next part: “We need our check.”

…..“Yes ma’am,” the boy soldier said, like I s’pose he’d said to his maw and his grandmaws and his aunts maybe a zillion times. “Yes ma’am,” and backed off.

…..I thought I heard some scrabbling in the back, under the floor of our enclosed porch, and I hoped the soldier hadn’t. Noises there aren’t uncommon. We have a possum, maybe a family of them, in the crawlspace under the porch floor. Or it’s squirrels. Not rats, I hope. But I didn’t want the soldier poking around down there.

…..Then we heard an explosion, very big and such a fast crack of noise it was impossible to tell from where, but must have been close, pretty close. My soldier said, “Stay here” to me and strode out the way he’d come to check with his partner — who wasn’t there. “Where’d he. . .?” my soldier said aloud and then bounded off, towards the next block. I went out behind him, saw him running to where a bunch of uniforms had gathered, beyond the intersection, in the wake of the tanks and trucks, and I went back inside.

…..“Where’d he go, John-John?” asked Maw.

…..“Never mind,” I told her. “Never mind.”

…..But I was a little worried. I went down to the basement, through the door that’s in the kitchen. I keep a gun in a secret place in the storage space down there. The gun’s old, I’ve never fired it, and it would probably blow up if I tried. I don’t have any bullets. It’s a keepsake.

…..It was my grandpaw’s. He was a newspaper delivery boy in the 1920s when there were newspaper wars going on. The rivalries got tough, with thugs dumping his papers and threatening him. Maybe even worse than that. Night after night. So he’d bought a revolver.

…..But a gun won’t help these days. Not a handgun like that, not handled by an old man like me against soldiers, tanks and trucks. So I don’t have bullets. I just like to touch it, now and then.

…..Through the basement door that leads out back, I heard the scrambling outside again — but different, this time men clomping through our yard. It’s not very large and there’s nothing there, just the garage and weeds and chain fences on both sides of the weed patch separating it from the neighbors’ weed patches. A few wooden steps up to our back landing, a few concrete steps down to our basement door.

…..From the inside, I lifted the plank that secured the basement door, pushed it open, took a couple steps up and poked my head out. Two soldiers were standing in our weeds, which were up past their ankles, swinging their guns around, looking this way and that. I called to them. “Can I help? What you looking for?”

…..“Yeah,” said one. I didn’t think it was the one who’d come in our front way, but I couldn’t be sure. They looked alike. “Yeah. Anybody here?”

…..“Here?” I repeated. “Here? Just me. And my maw.”

…..“Uh-huh,” said the soldier. “You sure?”

…..“One of your buddies was just inside,” I said. “He just ran down the block. Was there an explosion?”

…..“Never mind,” said this soldier. His partner was butting the nozzle of his gun into the weeds, searching for something in them. Maybe anthills.

…..“There’s no one here,” I said.

…..“I’ll just look,” said the soldier, coming towards me. “What’s down there?” waving his gun barrel in my general direction.

…..“Basement,” I said. “Out here we keep some tools,” waving my hand at the stuff around me, as I took a step back. “You can see: Snow shovel. Rake. Buckets.”

…..He stood at the top of those stairs, bent and peered at the mess. The buckets sat on the ledge of the crawlspace. They were filled with rocks that once upon a time long ago Maw used for framing garden beds. Way long ago. Dangling cobwebs. Rags. Snow shovel, rake, broom. Nothing, really.

…..Another air-splitting boom cracked the world then. I could have sworn the ground tilted for an instant, but maybe it was in my head. And shouts were wafting to us from where it happened. Then shrieks. Cries of pain, so loud that even 50 yards away hairs on the back of my neck and my forearms rose and stirred, in fright and sympathy.

…..The soldier near me looked at the one farther — they reached silent agreement — and ran out of the yard, in the direction of the shouts and screams.

…..I walked up to look after them, then back down the concrete basement steps. There were the long-handled implements, the buckets of stones, a tarp flung like randomly under the crawl space. I picked up the rake and speared the tarp.

…..“Okay, I’m here,” said someone under it. They folded it back.

…..It was the young man I thought I’d seen from my back window, among the gang running in the alley. He wore a red windbreaker, which wasn’t much against the cold. And wouldn’t red stand out?

…..“What do you want?” I asked.

…..“You gotta let me in,” he said.

…..“I’ve got to?”

…..He shrugged. He was maybe 20, 25, though at my age I can’t judge others’ ages well anymore. He was thin, middle-height. His face was long, topped with a thatch of black hair, with black caterpillar eyebrows, hard brown eyes, long nose, long jaw to square chin. He smiled at me, lopsided, wolfish. I imagined he charmed the neighborhood girls and older women.

…..It was dangerous to have him in the crawlspace, with the soldiers lurking around. It would endanger me if he was found there, which was likely if I let him stay. If he left through our back gate into the alley — he might be seen by soldiers out there, too. It might be worse for us if he was found inside, but that seemed less likely.

…..So I took the odds. I gestured he should come out, and when he did I ushered him inside and closed the basement backdoor behind us. He grinned and took a big gulp of air. I pointed past the washing machine, dryer, sinks, furnace and generator up the stairs to the kitchen and followed him there. I motioned he should take a seat at the kitchen table, so he did. He leaned back and stretched his legs forward. He grinned at me again.

…..“You got coffee?” he said, glancing at the pot on the stove. “I’d like some.”

…..I pouted him a cup and handed it over.

…..“John-John,” Maw caterwauled. “John-John, did someone come in?”

…..The young man shrugged at me, like he didn’t care what I said.

…..“Yes, Maw,” I answered.

…..She rolled in on her wheelchair.

…..“Did you bring my check?” she asked. Suck, suck on the oxygen.

…..“Not yet,” the young man said, catching my eye and winking. “But I promise, I will. I will get it for you.”

___

Howard Mandel is a writer, editor, educator, a radio, recording and event producer, and has been president of the Jazz Journalists Association since 1994. A Chicago native and now back there after more than 30 years in New York City, Mandel‘s work has appeared in the Chicago Daily News and Reader, New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, DownBeat, The Wire, Swing Journal, Bravo! and as annotations on dozens of records. Mandel‘s books are Future Jazz (Oxford University Press), Miles Ornette Cecil – Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge), The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Billboard Books), The Definitive Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree Press) and The Jazz Omnibus (Cymbal Press). He’s blogged at ArtsJournal.com/JazzBeyondJazz and on Substack (Mandel‘s media diet). He’s written fiction since childhood.