The Wrong Man by Matthew Louis

heroics gone? Wasn’t this my chance?   I stumbled once on the steps, caught myself on the iron railing in mid-tumble and kicked my legs out before me and kept moving. I hit the walkway and could hear them coming now, their shoes slapping the cement stairs as I darted ahead and all but dove between another set of buildings and down another walkway.
    A half dozen of the ground level apartments have miniature back yards enclosed by five foot wooden walls and I dove over the first wall, hardly touching it in my adrenaline high. I landed like a cat and flattened myself to the damp grass. Beside me there was a tarp draped over some bicycles and I inched underneath it, cringing at its deafening crinkling but pulling its corner down until I was halfway hidden. I kept the gun raised, hugging myself against the cool bike frames and releasing my breath in shuddering gasps.

    A half hour passed. The gun was still in my hand, although I had uncocked it. Nobody had come by this yard, nobody had looked for me here. My joints were stiff from curling my frame into a ball. My knees ached as my legs unfolded. I dropped the gun into my pocket and boosted myself over the wall. I circled out of the apartment complex, walked two blocks out of the way and entered the dark shopping center from the far end. My car sat by itself, a pale vessel anchored in a black asphalt sea. I had a moment of panic in which I slapped my front pockets, reached in and found my keys still there, and then I broke into a run, made it to my car, and drove off toward the only place I could think of.

9
     

    M y grandfather ’ s pickup and my grandmother’s clean, neat lower-middleclass Ford Taurus were in the driveway. The neighborhood slept, utterly. I rolled past the house and pulled to the end of the street, rounded the corner, and parked in the alleyway, edging to my right until the side mirror touched the outside of the backyard fence my grandfather had built twenty years before. It was nearly
four a.m.
I could feel the fingers of exhaustion clawing at my mind, trying to get a good grip and pull it down into the quicksand of unconsciousness.
    I walked around the front, found the door locked, and, having no other choice, knocked.
    Within moments I was facing my grandfather in his robe. He was shrunken, stooped with age and gray, although there were still proud streaks of dark in his hair. His face was a collapsed, creased thing, the skin drooping as if melting, and his eyes had a wet sparkle in the half-light. The doctor had recently told him his heart might stop at any moment but he stood before me like a dangerous man, unblurred from sleep, because, I knew, he didn’t sleep at night.
    “Jesus-God, Sam!” he said. “I almost knocked your goddamned head off. What the hell are you doing?”
    I saw he had a nine-iron in his right hand as I passed inside.
    “Well?” he said. He hadn’t spoken in hours, was probably sitting in front of his computer when I knocked, and his voice was a growl. “Jesus! What the hell happened to your face, Sam?”
    “Sorry about this, grandpa. It’s a long, long story. Listen, can I tell it to you tomorrow and sleep on the couch tonight?”
    He looked at me for a moment, shook his head and smiled. “Christ. Be my guest.” I could almost read his thoughts. He was imagining I had gone drinking, got in some fistfight and my girlfriend had kicked me out for the night. “There are some blankets in the hall closet, I think. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
    And then he walked off. A moment later I heard him talking to my grandmother as he ushered her back into their bedroom. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just Sam. Yes, Sam. He had a fight with his girlfriend or something and is going to sleep on the couch.” And then he went into the bedroom across the hall, where he surfed the web and talked to other ancient, insomniac Republicans all night, and the door latch clicked.
    I found a heavy knit blanket, stripped