Free If the River Was Whiskey by T.C. Boyle

rubbed wrong, and just plain pissed he could think of nothing but the big glistening Mannlicher on the wall in the den).…No, it was Rance Ruby’s stupid, fat-faced, shit-licking excuse of a kid.
    Picture him sitting there in the first faint glow of early morning, the bottle mostly gone now and the fire in his guts over that moron with the barking face who’d run into him on the freeway just about put out, and then he looks up from the kitchen table and what does he see but this sorry lardassed spawn of a sorry tattooed beer-swilling lardass of a father cutting through the yard with his black death’s-head T-shirt and his looseleaf and book jackets, and that’s it. There’s no more thinking, no more reason, no insurance or hope. He’s up out of the chair like a shot and into the den, and then he’s punching the barrel of the Mannlicher right through the glass of the den window. The fat little fuck, he’s out there under the grapefruit tree, shirttail hanging out, turning at the sound, and then
ka-boom
, there’s about half of him left.
    Next minute Everett Coles is in his car, fender rubbing against the tire in back where that sorry sack of shit ran into him, and slamming out of the driveway. He’s got the Mannlicher on the seat beside him and a couple fistfuls of ammunition and he’s peppering the side of Ruby’s turd-colored house with a blast from his Weatherby pump-action shotgun. He grazes a parked camper on his way up the block, slams over a couple of garbagecans, and leans out the window to take the head off somebody’s yapping poodle as he careens out onto the boulevard, every wire gone loose in his head.
    Ellis Hunsicker woke early. He’d dreamt he was a little cloud—the little cloud of the bedtime story he’d read Mifty and Corinne the night before—scudding along in the vast blue sky, free and untethered, the sun smiling on him as it does in picturebooks, when all at once he’d felt himself swept irresistibly forward, moving faster and faster, caught up in a huge, darkening, malevolent thunderhead that rose up faceless from the far side of the day…and then he woke. It was just first light. Hilary was breathing gently beside him. The alarm panel glowed soothingly in the shadow of the half-open door.
    It was funny how quickly he’d got used to the thing, he reflected, yawning and scratching himself there in the muted light. A week ago he’d made a fool of himself over it in front of Sid and Tina, and now it was just another appliance, no more threatening or unusual—and no less vital—than the microwave, the Cuisinart, or the clock radio. The last two mornings, in fact, he’d been awakened not by the clock radio but by the insistent beeping of the house alarm—Mifty had set it off going out the back door to cuddle her rabbit. He thought now of getting up to shut the thing off—it was an hour yet before he’d have to be up for work—but he didn’t. The bed was warm, the birds had begun to whisper outside, and he shut his eyes, drifting off like a little cloud.
    When he woke again it was to the beep-beep-beep of the house alarm and to the hazy apprehension of some godawful crash—a jet breaking the sound barrier, the first rumbling clap of the quake he lived in constant fear of—an apprehension that something was amiss, that this beep-beep-beeping, familiar though it seemed, was somehow different, more high-pitched and admonitory than the beep-beep-beeping occasioned by a child going out to cuddle a bunny. He sat up. Hilary rose to her elbowsbeside him, looking bewildered, and in that instant the alarm was silenced forever by the unmistakable roar of a gunblast. Ellis’ heart froze. Hilary cried out, there was the heavy thump of footsteps below, a faint choked whimper as of little girls startled in their sleep and then a strange voice—high, hoarse, and raging—that chewed up the morning like a set of jaws. “Armed response!” the voice howled. “Armed response, goddamnit! Armed