Suckers - Jack Kilborn [47]
“Fuck!”
A click on the other end, and then a dial tone.
“Oops,” I said.
“What happened?” Roger asked.
“He said ‘fuck’ and hung up.”
“Why did he do that?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, call him back. Let him know we were just kidding.”
I dialed again.
No answer.
And then an answer: “Leave me alone! You didn’t see it!”
“Uh, Dennis…?”
He hung up again.
“Okay,” I said. “That was…weird.”
“Did he know it was you?”
“He’s never even met me!”
“Is he coming over here?”
“How should I know?”
“Let’s go look!”
We hurried upstairs into Roger’s room. He immediately peeked through the telescope. “He’s there in his living room. He’s lying on the floor.”
“Is he hurt?”
“I can’t tell. The knife is next to him. Oh, jeez, what if he killed himself?”
“Should we call the police?”
“I don’t know…I don’t see any blood…”
“Maybe we should go over there.”
Roger nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”
We hurried back downstairs, quietly opened the front door, and then rushed across Roger’s yard over to his neighbor’s house.
“Should we knock?” I asked.
“No, we shouldn’t knock,” said Roger, giving me a “You’re a rather dumb person” look. He threw open Dennis’ door and we walked inside. Dennis still lay on the floor. No pool of blood that I could see. The door swung closed behind us.
“Dennis?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
No response.
“Is he breathing?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”
“We should check his pulse.”
“You check his pulse!”
“Fine.” I cautiously walked over to the body, then knelt down beside it. I pressed my fingers to his wrist.
“Anything?”
“I’m not sure I’m in the right spot.”
“Well…poke him with something.”
“I’m not going to poke him!”
“Then breathe on him. Do something to wake him up!”
Suddenly Dennis sat up, arms outstretched, and shouted something that sounded approximately like “AAUUGGHHAAA!!!!”
I scooted backward at 37,916 miles per hour and shouted something that sounded approximately like “Shit!” Then I punched Roger in the shoulder as hard as I possibly could. I struck a particularly solid part of his shoulder and it felt like I’d smashed the bones in my hand into bite-sized chunks, but it was worth it.
“Ow! Why’d you hit me?”
“Because you’re a jerk!”
“What’d I do?”
“You planned this whole thing! I almost wet my pants! You probably wanted to tell everybody at school that I wet my pants, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t me!”
“Yes it was!”
“No it wasn’t!”
But then I discovered something truly shocking. Roger had wet his own pants. Would somebody who had plotted out this scheme spontaneously urinate over the revelation of the surprise? Unlikely. So Roger was innocent. I’d struck the shoulder of an innocent man.
I turned my attention away from Roger and toward Dennis. The smug bastard who’d scared me half to death was looking…well, not particularly smug. Not smug at all, in fact. He looked somewhat depressed, and somewhat homicidal.
“Did I scare you?” he asked. I could see the butcher knife on the floor where he’d been lying.
Roger and I both nodded.
He wiped a tear from his eye. “I knew I could scare you. I was good, wasn’t I? I can act, right?”
“You sure can,” Roger said, eyeing me nervously as if to say “Did you perhaps notice that this gentleman is sounding depressed and homicidal?”
“I know I can! I spent days practicing for that audition! I spend days practicing for every audition! So why the hell don’t I ever get the part?” He picked up the butcher knife. “Huh? Tell me why I never get the part?”
I said the first thing that popped into my mind: “Because… you have…you’ve got…um, facial features…that…that…you know, they aren’t traditional…and…and…and…you know how Robert De Niro doesn’t really look like a movie star, but he’s famous, but it probably took a long time because he doesn’t…you know…he’s got that mole and people who make movies took a while to figure out how good he was, but now they all love him…that’s you…you’re like Robert De Niro.”
“Yeah,” said Roger.
Dennis considered that. “De Niro is a god to me.”
“He’s a god to everybody,” I said. “So you just have to keep trying and someday you