As American as Apple Pie

In my line of work, I’m expected to make impossible decisions. Not that I am the only person that ever needs to make such decisions, I wouldn’t call such people rare, but the type isn’t exactly common either. I kill people for a living. Pulling the trigger on someone, taking their life, that has always come easy to me. I didn’t start out killing animals or anything, but early in the Terror Wars, back when things were still patriotically colored, I’d lied about my age to join Uncle Sam’s Cause. I liked the necessity of self-discipline, but not the discipline. Turns out, I liked the killing, too. You’re not supposed to like the killing part, you’re just supposed to see it as a necessary evil. You go over to some other person’s country and kill the poor bastard for not living like Uncle Sam expects him to or because he has too many unmined minerals or too much natural gas, too many barrels of untapped oil, or some rare earth metal, maybe lots of clean water. Sometimes we were expected to kill them for worshipping a god besides Mammon, but the Brass never pitched it that way through the propaganda machine.

When I say I enjoyed the killing I don’t mean in a sadistic way. I mean I could do it and still sleep at night. Other guys, the ones who grew up in households where John Wayne still held sway, they’d piss themselves while firing blind from behind cover. At least they were firing. Not all of them were that way. But all of them struggled to sleep at night. If you stayed up late enough, you’d never get to sleep for all the whimpering. I don’t think of these men, my comrades, as weak or cowards. War is hell is a true statement; war is a terrifying hell is more true still. But being close to death gives you a feel for it. You learn to live in a between space that doesn’t feel quite right; you can never get comfortable. Death comes out of nowhere; that is true on and off the battlefield, but when you tempt it, it has a way of fucking with you. I never got to a place where that bothered me much. I’d eat morning chow, go out and scrub a few lives from the score sheets the Generals kept tallies on under the big tent, then I’d go to bed feeling satisfied. Even brewed in the crucible of extreme political dishonesty it had a way of feeling like an honest day’s work. Every bullet fired—both ways—was a fifty-fifty chance things were going to end for someone. I can honestly say I wish things weren’t this way, but not everything is up to us.

Uncle Sam decided my time was up. I was out-processed, shipped home, given some rudimentary resources to reacclimate to civilian life, access to some headshrinkers, and a steady non-combat job. Paid well enough. The doctors were doing the best they could with underfunding and a superabundance of soldiers pouring in from the eight active war zones the military juggled. Things looked like they might resume the pallor of normalcy. That is, until I started not being able to sleep even with the addition of some heavy hitting sleeping pills. I started bouncing around from job to job. I started and ended relationships in drunken fits of rage. I quit shaving and brushing my teeth. After a while I quit showering. I was living unclean, unhealthy, and uninspired. The doctor’s said I had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and upped my appointments with the clinic and my dosages. One morning, staring into a mirror I’d cracked with my fist the night before, I realized I didn’t have PTSD, I was missing something.

At first, I thought it was the adrenaline rush of being on the battlefield, so I sought out that particular high in mixed martial arts and organized street brawling. I was good enough to win most of my fights, even being out of shape, but the high wasn’t what I was after. I enjoyed it, sure. But it didn’t fit into the hole I was trying to fill. So, I kept looking for what it was. I thought maybe it was the closeness of the camaraderie that only warriors can know so I joined the American Legion and the VFW, I started playing semi-pro sports—I easily made a regional football team. I’m a pretty big, well-built guy. Me, at fullback, is a running back’s wet dream. Still, even with the old guys sharing their stories, glories, gutsiest days, and losses and me sharing the ups and downs of a locker-room, I soon realized I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for in those spaces. Then, I met Debbie.

Debbie was being held in a headlock by a brute of man when I came stumbling out of Rickert’s Pub. I only intended to break up the fight, maybe defend this unknown woman’s honor, but me and the brute started trading blows, and the guy ended up dead at my feet. I ended up sitting behind bars for six weeks while the police, prosecutors, and an overworked public defender figured out I was acting in self-defense. That I expected. What I didn’t expect was to walk out of the jailhouse and see Debbie, wearing acid washed jeans, a copper-colored blouse, and leaning against a red Ferrari Testarossa. She offered to give me a ride, but I didn’t know where I was going. Debbie helped with that, too.

As fortune would have it, Debbie—I still don’t know her real name—was a contract fixer for people that needed other people dead. The guy I’d bludgeoned to death with my bare hands was her triggerman. They’d been fighting about a payout when I intervened. She said the least she could do was give me his cut for my troubles. I took the money. It was then, shoving a wad of hundred-dollar bills into my half-torn shirt pocket, that I realized what I had been looking for, and I told Debbie what I needed was a job. That was three years and nineteen bodies ago. That is the story of how I came to be standing in front of the pastry case in Stan’s Diner trying to make an impossible decision—pie or cake.

People in my line of work are superstitious. It comes with the territory. Everyone I have ever known in this line of work, on both sides of the law, has a routine they follow, something they do to try to tip the scales in their favor. Might be lucky socks, or a special talisman, or a simple prayer. Me, I have an achy sweet tooth before I kill someone. When I was fighting Terror, I’d open an MRE and eat the dessert before wading into the dust of battle. Now, I go to Stan’s Diner. Stan makes the best desserts in town. Surprising to most people because you’re likely to find cockroaches carting off your crumbs and sometimes your last bite, but if you’ve ever had a taste of the goodies in Stan’s pie counter, well, you’d understand why the roaches would fight you for it.

Sometime this weekend, hopefully tonight, I’m supposed to kill a man named Jeto. He’s gotten too big for his britches according to the guys that actually run the city. Jeto has grown his little gang quite impressively and expanded operations exponentially, so he needs to go. Shame, too, because if I could talk this guy into going legit, he’d probably own the city in a couple of years. If he’d pack up and move to Vegas, he would likely be a billionaire before his thirtieth birthday. I’ve been following the guy’s career in the news. He has quite a reputation, like me, on both sides of the law. I knew Debbie would get the contract for this guy which meant I would get the contract for this guy. I knew I’d get it because I do my work up close and messy; I like the other guy to have a fighting chance. I don’t snipe my targets. Sniping serves a purpose, but I don’t like it. Sniping is an exclamation point at the end of someone’s life. Surprise! Gotcha when you weren’t looking. That’s not my style. I like to leave more of an ellipsis in the places I’m paid to go. Jeto has a chance, not an even one, not even a good one, but he’s got one. In the morning paper he’ll be the message the Big Guys are hoping to send. But right now, I’m torn between blueberry and coconut crème.

All the food at Stan’s tastes like the grease it’s cooked in, but the desserts taste like summer sunshine or autumn leaves falling. They taste like good memories you hope you never forget. A mother’s hug or daddy’s best bedtime story. There are a lot of options in the case which is why I started coming here. I keep coming back because no one else stacks up. I like Stan because he’s the best at what he does and so am I, we’re fellow travelers. My superstition is getting the choice right. I never just grab what looks good I have to get what feels right. I don’t want to be engaged in a fight with someone feeling unsatisfied going in. Even after I’m successful I just feel that lack of satisfaction afterwards. It can stick with me for days. I don’t want to think about the other option if I get the choice wrong.

That’s why I’m torn tonight. Nothing feels right no matter how long I stare at the delicious choices. Jeto is a big prize. Not just for Debbie, but for me. Number twenty. I can’t fuck this up, so, I’ve been standing here like a bump on a log for fifteen minutes. Betty is starting to get sore about it, but I don’t have any words for her to convey the importance of this decision. All I knew for certain walking into the joint tonight was that it wouldn’t be the cherry. When I did my first job for Debbie, it was cherry, but it hasn’t been cherry since.

“Hey, Big Fella,” Stan says walking through the door from the kitchen, “trouble deciding tonight? Well, if you can wait just a minute or two more, I’m putting the finishing touches on a Death By Chocolate cake and I can get you a big slice of that. That might be your problem, no chocolate options in that case.”

I smile, nodding in agreement. A big slice of Death By Chocolate. Jeto doesn’t have a chance tonight. Sometimes, these things just aren’t up to us.