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Evening News
Nathan Daniels got shot in the head one night in a gang. It was a story even in a slow spot on the evening news. A jet airliner blew a tire on take off out at DFW. A passenger was frightened.
"I didn’t know what was happening," a lady from Baltimore, who had been sitting in row 16g, faced the camera. "I heard a popping sound."
"A popping noise?" the reporter held the microphone.
"Yes, sort of from the tail section. You know, like the sound a gun makes whenever it’s not on television."
That was how sorry a night the evening news went. A wife stabbed her two boys. That was the big sensation going around Dallas, for a while, whenever her story didn’t jive about a robber with a baseball cap. Then the discrepancies in her personality that neighbors remarked. Something seemed weird. You know, not that the people across the street who met her twice in eight months, wanted to be judgmental. Weird, though. They watched her through the slats in the blinds. Robbers didn’t just jump into houses and start stabbing people. That didn’t make sense. Little boys, aged 5 and 6. Cute. Psychiatrist with a pipe talked to assure that a cure was available for just about everything.
"Everything?" the reporter held the microphone.
"Oh, yes, absolutely," the psychiatrist nodded his head enthusiastically. "There’s just about a chemical for every imbalance that you might imagine. Even serial killers are usually modified with a slight dosage of something taken orally twice a day. You’d be surprised the soothing effects that 26 milligrams of thyrotropin has on a fellow in Chicago who cruised the streets for prostitutes that he hacked into tiny pieces, stuffing into plastic trash bags, and buried in his basement. He converted to Christianity and started lifting weights in no time at all. It’s a shame our prison system has to remain so overloaded when a couple of pills could do the trick. It’s all chemicals, you know?"
Nathan Daniel’s chemicals oozed out onto the pavement in front of a housing project where he was cruising with his buddies for gold hubcaps on a low rider Chevy they had spotted in the area not two hours before. Nathan held a gun in the back seat when they came cruising up the corner. The automatic lights on the street lamps were just popping on whenever the driver slowed.
"There," the driver, who lived through the attack and told police afterwards, "We weren’t doin’ nothin’", pointed. "On the other side of the dumpsters."
Nathan nodded his head. He checked the chamber for a bullet. He owned a gun since ten. A person was crazy in this neighborhood if they didn’t. Billy C. was crazy that day he went out for beer. Just drove out for beer one day whenever the rain came and the streets were slick.
"It’s just rain, hell," Billy C. slapped him in the face. "If any customers come around tell them I’ll be back in five."
"Five," said Nathan.
"Five," Billy C. slapped him in the palm of his hand.
The cops came to clean up the mess afterwards. A man approached Billy with a scar on his face. That’s what the cop who took the information on a small white pad with a pencil had to go on. A scar on his face.
"What did he look like?" the cop held the pencil in the ambulance before Billy expired. That’s what the paramedics called it: expiring.
"Scar," Billy sputtered between breaths with a tube in his chest.
"Scar?" the police spelled "scar" on his pad.
"Scar on face."
"A facial laceration?" the cop wrote. It was all the same thing, really. Expiration, dying. The cop heard a 211 call on his portable radio and was assisted in three other situations that shift before calling it a night.
"Two DWI’s, a hostage situation, three prostitutes, and a drug dealer shot at close range in the chest," he listed on his fingertips in the locker room undressing. "That’s an evening. Hey, you want to go grab a couple of brewskies? Shoot a couple of racks at Maxines?"
"No," said his partner. "My wife will kill me if I don’t get that door jam fixed this weekend."
No arrests. No convictions. No clues. Nathan sat in the car with the gun in his lap. On the evening news, his junior high school picture was flashed. His uncle utterly shocked.
"Just ain’t the way this neighborhood used to be," he shook his head to the camera.
On another channel, some Arabs in the Middle East exploded a truck bomb, killing forty-six. Major war had ended and everybody was hopeful the peace process would continue. Leaders on both sides condemned the attack, praising the spirit of cooperation. After all, global harmony seemed like such an impossible task just but a couple of years ago. Pretty soon, television would eventually crack the China market. Nathan Daniel’s uncle sat in his captain’s chair in his living room with roaches once the cameras had gone to bring truth to the American public from various other locations, flipping through the channels. It all appeared like such a dream. Amazing technology really.
Jim Manton
James Manton has traveled extensively throughout the United States, in the early years throughout the western US,
to several winters working with a seismic crew in Alaska, and most recently to England and New Zealand. His early
enthusiasm as a writer was interrupted in the mid 1980s with Lotus 123 and his first PC. DOS was soon conquered,
then C. He became a consultant, moving around quickly, gaining skills. Windows was the next hurdle followed by
object oriented C++ and Delphi, XML and Oracle. He lives in Dallas and is a software developer for an Internet
company in Hawaii and New York. The first two chapter of his novel in progress, MicroMan, was a finalist in the Santa Fe Writers Project.
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