Something in My Eye: Stories by Michael Jeffrey Lee

and so we, being his friends, wish to help ease his pain. Several weeks ago, when you arrived in town, our boy saw you walking near the hospital with your arms up in hopefulness, and he smiled at you for a while, but in that smile lurked a terrible knowledge because he recognized your face from a picture your brother used to carry in his wallet when they were deployed together in the same squadron. This was before our boy shot him by accident, and although many years in the past, the memory is deforming him, and he’d now like nothing better than to have a duel with you. Don’t ask us the reason, it’s just what he wants.” I did try and make a run for it at this point, but they circled in closer around me and kicked me with their boots. They told me that if I managed to get away, they would hunt me until the day I died, no matter the town I decided to settle in. “Just as we have made it impossible for you in this town in terms of employment,” they said, “so it will be in any future town if you do not comply.” Then they lifted the man from behind the bushes, who smiled at me, but not in a sweet way. The bandanna he wore was all sooty and crusted
with old blood. He handed me a silver pistol and told me to stow it away in my pants and he showed me that he had already done the same. Then we squared away at thirty paces, and one of the seventeen shouted, “Draw.” It seemed like he didn’t even try to unholster his pistol before I got him in the shoulder and he kind of crumpled to the ground. I felt bad about this, so I ran over to where he was and tried to staunch his wound with a piece of my dress shirt that I’d torn off. The seventeen all gathered around me, whispering to one another. Then they closed in and wrapped their fingers around my hand that held the pistol and helped me level it at his head. I pulled the trigger and it was done. They all thanked me individually, each shaking my hand and bowing, and told me I was in no danger and free to leave. Once their man stopped twitching on the ground, they pulled him away, his heels dragging along the concrete. I looked around for some warm things to cover myself, and found a couple newspapers and some cardboard. I lay down in the middle of the park, feeling not so good. I awoke as the sun rose, my feet numb from where the cardboard hadn’t been long enough to cover, and I stretched and did a little jog around the park to warm up. I saw a man walking a tiny dog, and I approached them and acted like I was going to pet the dog, but instead I picked it up and draped it across my shoulders like a mink and I sang my brother’s song to him in the voice of my brother, and then I lied and told him that the song was mine. He took off one of his walking shoes and shook out several hundred dollars, and I went directly to the bus station and took the first bus here, to this town. I have a lot of applications out, and the people at the mission are pretty good about delivering messages, so who knows. The public library has been kind about letting me use their computers. I have a long list of e-mail addresses that I’ve found just poking around on the web, which I’m going to send my story to, and tell them to pass it along to whoever might be interested. My father, when he was home and I was sitting on his knee in the kitchen, once asked me to fill him in on an adventure I had had while he was away. I started to tell
him about something important from my life but he stopped me in the middle of the story and told me that I was a bad teller, and that I should probably just go ahead and join the military so I could be useful, which I didn’t want to do because I didn’t want to die. He said I hobbled around in the silly parts and didn’t get around to telling the real stuff, which he thought was in the violence. His death was not peaceful, so I do hope it was at least interesting for him. One last thing: if we should