Free Hush Hush by Steven Barthelme Page A

the place, near as I could see. “Open 24 Hours” was painted on the window, in orange and white. Everything was orange and white. It was four in the morning.
    “Hey,” Freddy said, standing on the other side of the car.
    “Where you goin’?”
    “Hamburger,” I said. “Right?”
    Freddy shook his head. “Stay here. Keep an eye out.”
    “Freddy, let the asshole go. Let’s eat.”
    He gave me a look. “Wouldn’t be right,” he said.
    At that point the other guy took a half hearted swing at him and Freddy turned and knocked him backward aboutthree feet, handed me the razor, and then hit him three or four more times, very fast, with his fists and his elbow, and the guy went down. On the ground, the guy was whimpering. All the fight gone out of him in two seconds—it was bizarre. Freddy had his hair in his hand, and with his other arm reached out toward me. “Give me the knife,” he said.
    I looked at him. My hands were shaking. “Fuck no, what’re you, crazy? Let him go.”
    “Give me the knife.”
    I handed it to him.
    I thought, Oh, fuck, and looked quickly into the restaurant and then up and down the street. There was nobody. When I turned back around, Freddy was shoving a flat piece of sandstone from the landscaping into the guy’s mouth, and then he raised his boot way up and brought it down on the guy’s head. Teeth or something scattered around Freddy’s feet. I stood staring at the pristine, almost fastidious little garden with its squat palms inside a perfect rim and then the blood on the concrete and blood all around the guy’s mouth. Freddy flipped the razor open and whacked a hunk of the guy’s hair off, looked at it and stretched, slipped it into his pants pocket. This seemed to satisfy him and he let the guy’s head hit the pavement and looked at me.
    I didn’t know what to do. He waved toward the restaurant, asking, then turned back around and kicked the moaning guy on the concrete again.
    “I’m not hungry,” I said. “Let’s go.”
    “No, I’m hungry.” He stared at me. Behind him, the guy got up and sort of half ran, half crawled away toward the dark shops of the strip center. Hylo laughed.
    •  •  •
    Everything in the place was weird orange and white stripes. I kept waiting for cops to show up but they never did. Freddy was eating onion rings. He had asked for two orders of them, but the black kid who brought the food to the table brought three. The kid stood, with an orange plastic tray on a strap around his neck, like a cigarette girl, approving. When he put the stuff down in front of us, he said, “These are so good … I just really love these onion rings.”
    “They’re good all right,” Freddy said.
    The kid was maybe seventeen and there was about him this huge, terrible sweetness and you looked at him and thought, This poor kid is just gonna get crushed. He took his tray and walked back to the counter, behind it, and disappeared.
    Now Hylo was talking to me. “What did you learn tonight?” He smiled.
    “Don’t be an asshole?”
    “Exactly,” he said, smiled, looked around. “You don’t like me much, do you?”
    I just caught what he said. I was shaking, my whole body trembling, just a little. “This can’t be,” I said. “It’s not. It can’t be. I heard this story twenty-five years ago, when I was twelve. The stone in the guy’s mouth, the whole thing. The reason I know it can’t be is that—In the story, the guy’s name was Hylo.”
    He was eating. He didn’t seem to hear me, but then he shrugged. “When you heard that story, who did you imagine yourself to be?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Did you imagine yourself to be the guy smashing theother guy’s teeth, or did you imagine yourself to be the guy getting a limestone sandwich?”
    I looked at him. I had the car keys in my hand.
    “That’s really all there is,” he said. He was looking out the big plate glass windows, in a weary sort of way, at the bright, clean parking