“I’d never steal your wallet.” That’s how they said it. “I’d never steal your wallet if I needed money.” Otherwise, it was fair game. Wallets, wives, heirlooms, and money—all of them were worthy of theft or destruction as long as the theft or destruction was in no way necessary. It was a matter of romance, of honor.

“Gimme your wallet,” Chuck would say.

“Why?” might be Bright’s reply.

Then there’s this smashed watch in a rain puddle, the two of them grinning and scratching their heads over the senselessness of it all.

“I’d kill you,” Bright would say after a time of laughing, “if I didn’t want to so bad.”

“Yeah,” Chuck would say. “The feeling’s mutual.”

It got to where they couldn’t have anything, anything cared about or worth caring about. That was the nature of fair game. Even their lives had to be taken with casual purpose. The drinking, between the two of them, was a problem—so many nights of fatal accidents diverted by coincidence when either could’ve stopped the events with a hint of interest in his fate.

“Survival’s easy,” they’d say, “easiest thing on earth. Surviving despite best efforts, though, that’s something special.”

It’d started with Bright if it’d started with either of them. The way they told it, Chuck had been seeing this girl named Sheila for a few months when he walked in on her and Bright going at it naked-style. Angry and hurt, Chuck had said something like, “What the fuck, bro?” To which Bright had replied, still sweating and panting, “Fair game, bro. It’s not like I needed it.” Neither of them saw Sheila, again, but the thing remained.

Others came in on it, from time to time, just a few friends, here and there, while they still had friends. They all ended up homeless, in time, the fires and all, and, eventually, they all opted out, whether forced (resources, mortality) or by choice, seeking quiet returns to more careful paths. So the numbers changed here and there, nature of trends. Chuck and Bright, though, they lived it on every level, despite neither caring about it one way or another. It’d become their central algorithm, their source note.

Clarity of that note aside, the song to which it belonged grew old with repetition. In ways, they lacked the language to articulate their growing, mutual sense that things had spun out of control. In any case, to admit as much would be an admission of need or care, a forfeiture of a game with no prize or objective. Maybe they weren’t conscious of it, anyhow—the shift. Maybe it was a misunderstanding of their minds on the part of some passerby who heard Chuck, one night in a train yard, say, “I’d steal your wallet if I didn’t need it so bad.”

They were naked, by this point, their clothes lost to a night of drownings and terrific crimes. The bruises and scars were maps of their years with more clarity than any words ever could construct. They were frightening to see, the two battered shapes, pale as they were in the glow of the trashcan fire before them.

“I know,” said Bright. “I know better than anybody, but you know I don’t have one, anymore. You know that better than anyone.”

They got to thrashing each other, at that, attacking with whatever they could find. Bright came at Chuck, for instance, with a piece of rebar, broke two ribs with a single, solid connection. Chuck mixed a laugh with a scream, in response, and came back with a hubcap full of busted glass and rocks that he shoved cream-pie-style into Bright’s grinning face.

They didn’t want to kill each other, of course. That was against the rules. They weren’t looking to die, either. Maybe they were just hungry. They were definitely tired; cold, too. They were so cold. The game had, perhaps, progressed beyond all confines of tolerability. There were few moves remaining.

So, as Bright lay on the ground, blind and screaming, laughing and bleeding, Chuck could only think to say, “Nothing personal, bro,” before limping to the burn barrel and pushing it over on him. “I’d let you live,” he said, “if it mattered.”

The police responded to complaints of a scuff between a pair of naked men. They were slow to arrive, given the hour and the neighborhood, but arrive they did.

Guns drawn, they approached an uncooperative Chuck, Bright’s bloodied rebar raised in his hands like a baseball bat. Ordered to drop his weapon, Chuck could only laugh—in their statements, there was some confusion over whether it was crying or laughter, but, given the severity of the outcome, laughter had proven a more serviceable choice.

The officers advised him, once more, of his option. “Drop your weapon,” they advised, to which he replied that he would if it didn’t make so much fucking sense. Then he stepped toward them. It was just a little step—a half-step, really—but it was enough.

Fair game.

Timestamp: 03.16.08 at 04:45 PM. Filed under: Fiction.