Broken Cloud Buckets

By Dallas Hudgens

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Part One

Tom snapped his guitar case, picked up his cell phone and cigarettes from the bar, and headed outside. The street was quiet, black and narrow with a coat of spring rain shining under the lights. Donnie, the owner of The Arrow, stood against the building working on a cigarette, driven outside his own establishment by the city's smoking ban. Raindrops pelted the bar's old, red awning.

"That monitor is a piece of shit," Tom said. "I got nothing but muck coming out of it."

Donnie sighed. "Don't be an asshole. You know I'm not running the Fillmore here. Besides, I'm doing you a favor."

Tom thought better of mentioning the seven dollars in tips. What kind of favor was that?

"Yeah," he said. "Everybody's doing me a favor."

"And stop singing that song with all the cussing in the last verse," Donnie said. "People keep complaining."

"Fuck them. Ronnie Milsap didn't complain about it."

Tom checked the time on his cell: 8:33. He'd give Sidney until 8:40 before he called her.

"Where are you going, anyway?" Donnie asked. "I thought you were playing a nine o'clock set."

"I've got something to do with my daughter."

Donnie had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his head, fending off the damp wind. "She still driving you around?" he asked.

"Yeah. It's a good situation for both of us -- at least until I get my license back."

Tom was lying to himself as much as he was to Donnie.

"She wants to be an ambulance driver," Tom said. "She's studying EMT at the vocational high school."

Donnie mimed bringing a heart attack victim back to life. "She know how to use those paddles?

Tom nodded, checked his phone again. Truth of the matter was the technical knowledge had proved elusive. The sciences were not Sidney's strong suit, and the driving was no sure thing itself. For a while, every time she hit a bump or a pothole, she thought it was a person she'd run over, so then she'd have to circle the block five times to make sure no one was lying dead in the street because of her. She'd even sneak back out in the middle of the night to be certain.

"I fucking hate April," Tom said.

Donnie took a last drag, dropped his cigarette and ground it under his shoe. "Yeah, it's always a letdown," he said.

"No shit. You suck it up through the winter months, grind it out and get your hopes up, and then it's just the same old shit."

"But with flowers," Donnie said.

"Fuck the flowers," Tom said.

"Yeah, fuck 'em. I gotta take Claritin this time of year."

Donnie shook his head, a gesture of pity that pissed off Tom. Even worse, Donnie patted Tom's shoulder as he headed back inside his bar.

"You gonna play tomorrow?" Donnie asked.

Tom was lighting a cigarette. He slid the lighter back into his jacket pocket and took a long, warm draw on the stick. He wanted to say no, wanted to tell Donnie to take his piece of shit monitor and watered down drinks and go to hell. Instead, he just shrugged.

Sidney's mother, Connie, had called Tom from the county lockup a little over two years ago. She'd gone down on a mail fraud scam with her younger sister. Connie had been something of a pioneer in the identity theft world, but she and Tom hadn't seen each other since before Sidney was born. So Connie told him that he had a fifteen-year-old daughter. She told him about her own health problems, too. She'd had a bout with breast cancer a couple years earlier, had undergone a biopsy but neglected the follow-up chemo. Now, the cancer was back, had moved into her lymph nodes and lungs. "Inoperable," Connie said. She was headed to a prison hospital and wanted to know if Sidney could stay with Tom. What could he say? For some reason, the entire mess, cancer and all, felt like his fault.

Tom called Sidney at 8:40. "What the fuck?" he said. "Are you on your way?"

"Yeah, I'm almost there."

"Is that the TV I hear?"

"No, it's the car radio."

"Bullshit, you're still at the apartment. Are you watching the Weather Channel?"

She didn't say anything. He thought she might have hung up on him.

"Sidney?"

"There's a flood warning," she said.

"Well, what am I supposed to do?"

"Can't you take a cab?"

A car rolled down the street, wipers swaying, a spray in its wake. Tom set down his guitar case, stepped to the edge of the awning, and stuck his hand out into the rain. It was coming down pretty good. Nevertheless...

"Look," he said. "You need to get the squirrels out, okay? We don't live in a flood zone. We're five hundred miles from New Orleans, two hundred from the ocean. Plus, I've got some business at Target tonight."

"What's my cut?"

"What do you mean, what's your cut? I'll give you fifty dollars, same as last time."

She didn't answer right away. Anybody else, he would have assumed they were thinking it over. With her, he knew she was watching that Bob Stokes guy on The Weather Channel, sitting on the floor in front of her bed with the bottom of her sweatshirt pulled over her knees.

"How do you know it's not a flood zone?" she asked.

"Jesus, we looked it up. Remember? I wasted a day of my life online with you."

"FEMA used flood risk maps that were a hundred years out of date in New Orleans. People are rebuilding in places that are going to flood again."

The rain let up for a moment, barely ticking against the awning. Tom was thinking about going back inside, talking Donnie into another free beer, maybe playing a second set and taking a cab home later. He didn't have the energy to deal with Sidney.

"Fifty percent," she said.

"Of what?"

"Of what you get back for the speakers and DVD player. I'm taking the same risk as you."

"I'm paying the rent and food, not to mention broadband and cable. One hundred dollars is as high as I'm going."

"Two hundred."

Tom checked the time on the phone.

"All right. Two hundred. But that's just for tonight. We renegotiate this next time."

He dropped his cigarette and smothered the orange tip under his boot.

"Now get over here."

Part Two

The night had a salty glow, rain clouds hemming in the lights from the street, fast food stores, banks, and strip malls. Sidney moved slowly down the road in Tom's truck, eyeing the curb for any sign of flooding. Waters rose quickly in this part of the state. They could get ten inches of rain in four hours, like the flood of 1981. A driver would never know they were in trouble before it was too late.

The radio played low, the all-news station; traffic and weather on the sevens. It was 9:03, windshield wipers dragging, the top-of-the-hour newscast winding down.

XYZ-SIX-NINE-FIVE-SEVEN. XYZ-SIX-NINE-FIVE-SEVEN. She read the license plate of the VW in front of her. She repeated it seven times in her head. It had the same effect on her brain as giving the truck's stick shift a firm whack with the heel of her hand. Tom's Chevy had a tendency to hang up between second and third; metal grinding, forward motion slowed to odd-time lurches. It wasn't all that different from her head.

Her thoughts came back around to getting some money out of Tom. The fireman with the bad back in the upstairs apartment always had this blueberry bud that she liked. She had let him fuck her once so she could get high. But he'd been slow, pained, apologetic. After that, she'd been able to get away with just jerking him off. Even that was a twenty minute ordeal, but she didn't mind. She liked the damaged look in his eyes. It was the talking while they smoked that drove her crazy. He just wouldn't shut up, telling her about the "Law and Order" episodes he watched all day on cable, like he was related to the characters or something. All she saw was his lips moving. She had other things to worry about: the weather, pedestrians, things that she may or may not have said. Mostly, she just wanted to buy some bud, go back to her bedroom and smoke alone.

Tom took an uneasy step off the curb, shit faced again, a walking disaster. He'd want to talk, too, all the way to Target. Cigarette snagged in his teeth, long wet hair hooked behind his ears, he wedged his guitar case into the truck's cab and brushed the rain off the front of his jacket.

"They close at nine-thirty," he said. "We're gonna have to bust ass just to get over there."

"Calm down." Sidney waited for a van to pass before slowly pulling away from the curb. "Do you even have the receipt with you?"

He pulled a ragged white slip of paper from his jacket pocket, waved the receipt in front of his face like it was a hundred dollar bill he might use to light another cigarette.

Sidney took a quick look. "It's torn."

"Just in one spot," he said. "I think it looks less suspicious that way."

"You look suspicious," she said.

She always had doubts about his ventures, but this was actually a big step forward from his last scam, which involved spray painting an Xbox with white Duron, stuffing it into an Xbox360 carton and then trying to return it to Toys 'R Us for a cash refund. Compared to that disaster, the new scheme was fairly sophisticated and had already worked at Best Buy and Circuit City. The way it went, Tom would buy home theater speakers and a DVD player with a debit card, go back to the store the next day with only the receipt, grab the same items off the shelf, then take them to the return desk with the receipt and get a credit back to the card. Before anyone was the wiser, he withdrew all the money from the debit card account, threw the card away, and fenced the original electronics. He used the names and social security numbers of people in the apartment building to secure the debit cards and set up bank accounts. He'd gotten a master key to the mailboxes from the building manager, Marlena, a fall-down drunk who mixed Knob Creek with iced tea and thought Tom's guitar playing was "fucking masterful."

Nevertheless, Sidney had a feeling Tom would play this scheme until it bit him hard on the ass. There was something in his brain that just didn't work right. It was always a little out of tune.

Tom leaned forward, wet pants squeaking against the truck's seat, and touched the radio dial. "Mind if I change it?" he asked.

"Let me hear the weather first," she said.

He sighed, sat back, zipped his jacket, thought better of it and then unzipped it again. He checked his cell phone. He'd lost the charger, and his battery was about to go -- beep, beep.

"Bill called me this afternoon."

"I don't want to talk," she said.

Sidney felt the car take a pothole. Her heart jumped out of time. She checked the rearview mirror.

"You didn't hit anybody," Tom said.

"Fuck you."

"I wasn't being a smart-ass," he said. "I was just trying to reassure you."

He cracked the window, flicked his cigarette out onto the street, raked his fingers through his dark hair.

"Anyway, Bill says this bar wants to book us next Tuesday. Their house band broke up, and they're looking for a replacement."

"I thought Bill wasn't speaking to you."

Tom shrugged. "We talked it out. It was a communication problem. Nine times out of ten, that's what it comes down to. You just have to clarify. Sometimes, somebody takes something the wrong way, then they say something, and..."

Communication wasn't the problem. He was like a paper cut sometimes. That's why he never lasted more than a few months with a band. He bitched, domineered, laughed at other people's ideas. When he hit a wrong note on the bass guitar (and he hit a lot of them), it was never his fault. "That song needed a little rub there," he'd say. It was all about Tom knowing more than anybody else. He'd done some studio work years ago, had lasted all of a month playing bass in Barbara Mandrell's backup band. He later wrote a song that Ronnie Milsap recorded but never included on an album. Tom had played the tune for Sidney, adding a whole new verse of bitter, profane lyrics. She had to admit the first part of the song was actually pretty good; typical sad bastard stuff (drinking, death, a relationship gone bad), but at least he sang it all with some feeling.

He was still talking about the importance of communication. God dammit, she thought. Shut up. I'm trying to hear the weather.

"I was thinking," he said, "that you might sing that song with us again. Everybody loved that one last time."

Sidney honed in on the big red Target sign, pulled into the parking lot and headed for the loading area up front. The lights from the front doors were white and threatening.

The song was an old Buck Owens' tune: "Together Again." "You know I can't hit those notes."

"Bullshit," Tom said. "That soprano of yours is like peanut butter and jelly, smooth and sweet."

She'd actually enjoyed singing that song with Tom at home. She liked those moments when he taught her old songs. Even when he'd been drinking, his eyes were clear, and there was a bond within the notes. They smoothed out all the rough edges in the both of them. The songs were like warm houses that only they shared. The love that I knew is living again/and nothing else matters.

Onstage, she'd lost all of that. She missed notes, forgot the words and then laid awake thinking about it, about how she fucked up everything. She didn't want to be one of those people who stayed in their bedroom all the time. But she was always fucking up when she went outside, everything she did, everyone she spoke to. She would always make grave mistakes. And then she couldn't stop them from playing over and over in her head. Even when her mother was dying, all she could think about was some stupid thing she'd said to a boy at school. She felt like a ship going down from the weight of too many rats.

Sidney stopped the truck so Tom could go inside. He opened the door, swung one leg out onto the shiny pavement.

"Two-hundred dollars," Sidney said. "We're going to the ATM tomorrow."

He looked back at her, nodded slightly.

"And don't be stupid," she said.

Part Three

Tom lingered at the printed t-shirts near the front of the Target. He'd bitched to Donnie one night about the "vintage" concert t-shirts he'd seen at the store, how they tainted the purity of art with capitalistic greed and a superficial message -- or something like that. Now that he was ten beers and two joints into the day, he found himself wanting to buy the Pink Floyd t-shirt with the cover of "Animals" on it. He could get it for Sidney to wear when she sang with them next Friday. Maybe nobody would know it had come from Target.

The store was cavernous and quiet except for his boots squeaking on the clean tiles. He and Sidney should have come earlier, when the place was crowded. He knew that much, and he also knew he should grab the speakers and DVD player from electronics and get the hell out of there. He picked up the Floyd t-shirt and carried it past the greeting cards, nodding to a kid in a red Target shirt who was stocking the slots with mother's day cards from a big cardboard box. Tom turned and walked back to the cards. The kid, dark-haired and sporting a caterpillar-like mustache, slid the box off to the side to make room for him. Connie had been a big card shopper back in the day. Cards and gifts. She was always a generous criminal.

He picked out a SpongeBob card for Sidney to go along with the t-shirt. He'd found it under the Best Friends Forever category. He took a minute to scan the mother's day selections. It was hard to picture Sidney with a baby, near impossible to see her outside the realm of her bedroom sometimes, either watching the Weather Channel or searching Weather Underground on her laptop. You couldn't be afraid of getting killed or fucking things up. That was one of the things he'd been meaning to tell her. Nothing was worth doing unless there was a chance of spectacular failure and/or bodily injury. He'd seen his own father retreat to a cheap motel where his monthly cigarette fires became a thing of legend -- a brother went a similar route, though he managed to always settle in the county lockup rather than a motel. Tom had felt it was his job to get things back on track, namely with Sidney when she first came to live with him. But from the time he'd met her, it felt like she was already a finished product. His family's coat of paint had dried on her.

The speakers were out of stock, which seemed impossible since there were four boxes on the shelf the day before. That was $300 of the purchase.

His phone vibrated, a text from Sidney -- hurry up. A feeling of dread expanded inside him. The air tightened like a tornado was bearing down.

He found the Philips DVD player, looked around to make sure the area was clear, and slipped the box under his arm.

The girl at the service desk was talking on her cell phone. She glanced up long enough to offer Tom a go-to-hell look.

"That's not what I said." She snorted, turned her back to Tom. "I don't care what that little bitch told you. She's a fucking liar."

The girl had her long hair pulled back into a pony tail. An US magazine lay open on the counter: Is Lindsay Headed for Disaster? When she'd finally ended the call, the girl eyed the DVD player, t-shirt, and card as if it all was an exhausting puzzle.

Tom handed her the torn receipt.

"Is all of this a return?" she asked.

"Just the DVD. I'll take a credit, and you can put the other things on my card."

He handed her the Visa. The name on the card was Oscar Emiliana.

She took the receipt and slowly typed numbers into the register. After a moment, she sighed, rubbed her temple and stepped back. "I don't know what's wrong with this thing."

"With what?" Tom asked.

The girl was looking past him. "Kevin," she said. "Will you do a return for me?"

Tom looked back and saw the kid with the starter mustache walking toward them.

"My manager's gonna do this for you," the girl said.

He was ass deep in it now. The smart thing would have been to make a run for the door and just stay the hell away from that particular Target store. But Sidney was expecting something like that from him. He'd made a run for it once before during the Xbox 360 fiasco. He'd been doing a lot of coke with Marlena, the crazy woman downstairs, back then. He wanted to walk out of this store with a juiced up Visa, and a t-shirt and card for Sidney. All of that might earn at least a little confidence from her.

Tom once again went over the exchange and purchase, and the young manager started to work on the cash register as if nothing was out of the ordinary. After a moment, he looked up at Tom and then back down at the DVD player. His lips were pursed, and he appeared hesitant to take his next step.

"Is there a problem?" Tom asked.

The manager -- his name tag read Kevin -- took his time. "Well, I saw you earlier in the store, and I don't remember you having this DVD player with you."

"My daughter had it. She got a headache and went back to the car."

Lying had always been like turning on a water spigot. Sometimes he felt like another person was speaking the words.

The kid sighed, looked past Tom as if he didn't want to move forward on the matter without some help. Tom glanced back over his shoulder. The store was empty as far as he could tell. It was only ten minutes until closing.

"Look," Tom said, "I'm not opposed to writing a letter of complaint."

The manager produced a walkie talkie from behind the counter. "Brian, I need your assistance at the service desk."

All of the sudden, the kid looked a lot older. The sight gave Tom a moment's hesitation. Before he could speak, or act, a security guard was standing beside him. He was about nineteen years old, big pipes for arms and a crew cut on his pale head, the kind of guy who got a hard on watching mixed martial arts.

Kevin cleared his throat and looked Tom in the eye. "Sir, I already know you took this DVD player off the shelf. I just scanned the bar code. If it had been sold to you yesterday, the sale would have shown up on the register."

"What are you saying, Kevin?" Tom spoke his name as if it was laughable,

"I'm saying that what you're trying to do is called a fraudulent refund. It's a serious crime."

"Listen," Tom said, "I'm feeling generous tonight. So, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take my receipt back and leave the DVD player with you. I'll come back tomorrow when the adults are in charge and have a serious discussion with your boss about all of this."

Tom could hear the security guard breathing harder at his side. The sound made him uneasy. He glanced over and noticed the guy's pupils were the size of dimes.

"Sir, we don't want a confrontation," the guard said.

But Tom could tell that he wanted nothing more than to make him bleed. The guy was practically smiling when he spoke the words.

Kevin was on the phone now. The local cops. Tom's cell phone vibrated again, another text from Sidney: wat r u doing?

Tom waved the credit card at Kevin. "Look, just ring up the t-shirt and the greeting card. Put it on my Visa, unless you think it's stolen too."

But the manager kept on talking into the phone, one hand cupped over his mouth, speaking too quietly for Tom to make out what he was saying.

"Hey," Tom shouted. "Get off the god damn phone and ring me up. I told you I wanted to buy this shirt and card."

The security guard edged closer and grabbed the back of Tom's arm.

Tom jerked away. "Why don't you go do some pushups, fuckhead."

The guy smiled, nodded, waggled his fingers at his side. He took a step toward Tom, got right in his face. Tom forced himself to stand his ground.

Kevin hung up the phone. He leaned across the counter and waved his hand at the security guard like he was giving a command to a dog.

"The police will be here in a few minutes," he said. "Sir, if you're telling the truth, then you have nothing to worry about."

The security guard was still in Tom's face; jaw set, breathing hard. His proximity limited Tom's options.

"I'm perfectly fine speaking to the cops," Tom said. "Do you mind telling this asshole to step off?"

Kevin leaned farther over the counter, gave the guard a little pat on the back. "Come on, Brian. Back off. Cops are coming to handle it. You're still on probation, remember?"

The guy stepped away, but not before giving Tom a poke in the chest with his finger.

Tom crossed his arms like he was prepared to wait. But as soon as Kevin was settled back behind the counter and the guard had pulled his cell phone from his pocket to check a text message, Tom grabbed the t-shirt and greeting card off the counter and sprinted toward the door. He'd played eight-man football in high school back in Oklahoma. He knew a little something about open field running.

But the guard wrapped him up three steps into the run. He never would have made it out of the backfield.

Tom went down hard on his knees and shoulder. The tackle knocked the breath out of him, but he knew he had to roll over before the security guard pinned him to the ground. He twisted onto his back just in time to catch a fist to the ear. The punch sounded like an explosion.

The next one closed his right eye, and the one after that ripped apart some cartilage in his nose. He was doing his best to keep his arms in front of his face, rope-a-dope style, but the guard found every opening. The big man let out a chuff of air with every punch -- whew, whew, whew.

Tom zeroed in on the guard's face with his left eye. The guy was getting careless, drawing back way too far on his punches and leaving himself wide open. Tom waited until he pulled back to throw a left. That's when he went for the guard's eyes with his thumbs.

The big man rolled off the top of him, knees and elbows on the tile floor, his hands covering his face. Tom pushed himself up to his knees and grabbed the t-shirt and card, which was now torn. As he scrambled to his feet, he could see Kevin hopping over the counter to come after him.

Tom ran to the automatic doors and turned to look back. Kevin was a good thirty feet in his wake, and the security guard had just now climbed to his feet. Feeling certain that Sidney was still parked just outside the door, he took the time to offer them both a clear view of his middle finger.

"Fuck you, assholes."

The cold rain poured down on his aching face when he reached the sidewalk. The water felt good, swirling at his feet in puddles, drenching him through his jacket. For a moment it didn't feel like any one season of the year. It just felt good. And then he noticed that Sidney and the truck were nowhere to be seen.

"Dammit, Sidney."

The manager and the security guard had almost reached the doors. Tom didn't know what else to do, so he took off across the near-empty parking lot, running toward the street.

Each step was an effort, a low slurping sound in his head. But it wasn't physical exhaustion. Everything had been tiring lately. He recognized the feeling, had known it was coming even before it arrived. It was like the sense he'd always had that a guitar string was about to break. It only made him play harder, until he was practically begging the goddamn thing to snap.

"Come on, Sidney. Where are you?"

He broke north toward the side exit. He just wanted to be in his bed, the cool sheets and soft comforter. Turning to look back, he no longer saw the manager or security guard. Without checking the traffic light, he ran into the dark street, the slurping still in his head when he heard the brakes of a car screaming on the wet asphalt. Its headlights froze him, but he didn't feel any fear or dread of pain. In the short time that he had to think, nothing at all entered his mind. He simply felt relieved.

Part Four

The douche bag on the radio was talking about a warehouse fire -- a fucking abandoned warehouse. He'd gone right through the weather update time. Meantime, water rushed along the curb in front of the store, more than when Sidney had let Tom out of the truck. She put the Chevy in gear and edged away from the water.

The problem was that few people understood the conditions of flash floods. It was hardly ever the biggest thunderstorms. Mostly, they were the result of multiple convective cells coming together and blowing up at once. There was rarely any warning. That was the main reason so many people died from flash flooding, in fact more than from any other weather occurrence.

Rain pounded the windshield, causing a roar that drowned out the voice on the radio. The tired wipers offered little help. Sidney drove to the middle of the parking lot, the crest of the asphalt, and stopped to text Tom: hurry up.

She waited, whipped through the radio dial and caught a weather update. Clear tonight, lows in the mid-sixties. It was a St. Louis station.

He should have been out by now. Either he'd run into trouble, or he was simply fucking around. Flip a coin.

Sidney eyed the parking lot's main exit. The downhill grade was ridiculous. What kind of idiot had paved the thing? She drove the truck toward the lights of the main street, stopping short of the lot's exit. The street bottomed out at the corner, water flowing in from a pair of car dealership lots. She couldn't even see the pavement at the intersection, just water.

"Shit."

She texted Tom again: wat r u doing?

She'd give him one minute to answer this time. If he didn't, then she'd have to leave him. She needed to check the model map on Weather Underground.

Dry Clean: Any Garment Any Time.

She read the sign across the street over and over, flexing the muscles behind her knees, left and right, left and right. Nothing helped. Her breathing was erratic, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her jaw.

The rain made it difficult to see more than just the white light from the front doors of the Target. Sidney checked the rearview mirror, then turned around and squinted. Where the fuck was Tom? She couldn't chance driving back around to check for him. Water still flowed down the street, and the rain hadn't let up. Nobody else was stupid enough to drive in this weather. She slid the stick into first gear and slowly pulled out into the street.

The truck moved easily through the water, the front tires spraying a wake nearly halfway up the doors. Sidney leaned as close to the windshield as possible, hands at 4 and 8 on the steering wheel, just like they'd taught her in driver's ed. so the airbag wouldn't break her arms even though Tom's truck had no airbags. But that was the least of her concerns.

Rain funneled into the intersection. Sidney, needing to make a right-hand turn, slowed the truck as she rolled into the flooded area. The rain sounded like gravel bouncing off the windshield, and water flowed up to and around the truck's fenders. The exhaust gave off a fwop, fwop, fwop like an outboard motor. For a second the truck drifted, clearly lifted off the asphalt by the rushing water. Sidney let out a whimper, feeling as if it had already swept over her. And then she had control of the vehicle again, steering it right and then straightening the wheels, emerging from the deepest water and out onto the street that ran alongside the shopping center.

She sped up immediately, moving through the gears, certain that the water was chasing her. She glanced in the rearview and side mirrors to check its progress. In the downpour, she couldn't see anything from the previous intersection except the faint, green glow of the traffic light. She drove faster, still checking the mirrors, barely watching the road in front of her. By the time she reached the next crossing and the yellow traffic light, a figure had appeared in the street, someone running. She barely had time to hit the brakes and swerve left before the right front fender and side mirror lifted the person off the ground.

The truck slid across the pavement, one front tire jumping the sidewalk before the vehicle came to a stop.

"Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

Sidney lay her head on the steering wheel, clenched her eyes shut, then opened them again. It was like she'd walked into a revolving door, leaving one concern behind to face an entirely new one. It was a change that she'd come to recognize. She could only fear one thing at a time, and those fears were constantly trumping one another: floods and traffic accidents and deadly diseases and always saying the wrong thing. The difference was that, up until now, these were only possibilities, never real. She should have talked to someone before this, she knew that much. A school counselor. The fireman. Tom. Any -- fucking -- body. Now, she had actually killed someone.

The rain slacked up a little, and the roar inside the truck quieted. Sidney could hear a voice outside the truck. It sounded like singing. er chest opened up and let the air inside. Her heart slowed a little. She threw open the door, jumped out into the rain, and ran around to the other side of the truck.

Tom lay on his side in the middle of the street. She knelt beside him and placed her hand on his shoulder. When she touched him, he stopped singing and let out a scream.

Sidney pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her sweatshirt and started to dial 911. Tom rolled onto his back and asked what she was doing. When she told him, he sat up and grabbed the phone from her.

"Jesus," he said. "Don't do that."

"Look at your face. You might have a head injury. I hit you with the truck."

"You hit my shoulder," he said. "I think it's just bruised. The fucking security guard did my face."

He looked back toward the Target parking lot. No security guard. No store manager.

Meantime, Sidney had taken a seat on the pavement, cold water seeping through her jeans and onto her skin. She crossed her arms over her knees, laid her head against them, and let the rain touch every nerve in her body. The water broke her down like silt. Before she could even try to fight off the sobs, they had overtaken her.

Part Five

Five Chapters will return Nov. 26 with a new story by George Singleton.

"Come on, Sidney. God damn. I'm okay, really."

Tom struggled to his feet, realizing in the process that something was messed up in his back. As for the shoulder, it may have needed medical attention. But not just yet. Not while Sidney was this upset.

"Besides," he said. "I think I was crossing against the light. It was my fault all the way."

She quieted down, though he felt certain it was not from anything he'd said. He realized his hands were empty and started to look around the street for the t-shirt and card. The card was nowhere to be seen, and the t-shirt lay right in the middle of a huge puddle.

"Shit."

He walked over, picked up the shirt and rung it out like a wash cloth. He shook it straight and showed it to Sidney. It hurt his arm to hold it out this way.

"There was a problem with the exchange. But I got you something."

She looked up, eyes nearly swollen shut. She reminded him a little of Connie in that moment, something about the tilt of her head, the bangs hanging right to the edge of her eyes. Generous. Those were Connie's eyes. Up until now, Sidney's had always darted around like bees, never slowing enough to register anything but constant vigilance.

Sidney stood up and studied the front of the t-shirt. It was obvious she didn't recognize the design.

"It's from an actual photograph," he said. "That's an old power plant in England, and the inflatable pig is real. It's a statement on capitalism, I think. I found it ironic they were being mass produced and sold at Target. Either way, "Dark Side of the Moon" is a much better album."

Sidney let out a sigh. "Are you sure you're okay?"

He knew that he had to find the girl some help. Where, or from whom, he had no idea. But he understood that the job, like many others, was above his skill level. Hell, he couldn't even remember the form for a song. Verse - Chorus - Verse - Chorus - Bridge - Chorus. The goddamn bridges and solos got him off track. It was something in his brain. Maybe that's why he was always forgetting the day of the week, too.

"You could have internal bleeding," she said.

His back did feel worse, like a splintered broom handle had been wedged between his tail bone and his neck. Pain gripped the length of it and spread across his chest. The shoulder was sore but not dislocated.

The rain had turned to drizzle. The pink sign from a Baskin Robbins reflected off the wet street, and a siren chirped in the distance. Still, no one else was out on the road. Tom considered the t-shirt with his good eye. He used it to dab some blood from his cheek and then tossed it over into the gutter. He hoped Sidney might say something about the gesture, might even retrieve the shirt.

Instead, she pulled the truck key from the pocket of her sweatshirt. Her eyes were darting again. "You have to go to the hospital. You might have blood in your lungs."

He could never reason with her, just like his father and his mother and his brother. They were all parts of the same damn song. He didn't know who went where, and all the strings were broken anyway.

"Goddammit, Sidney."

Tom grabbed her hand and tried to pry the key away from her. She pulled and struggled until he gave up. The pain in his back and shoulder doubled him over and broke his anger. He sucked in the wet air. It tasted like diesel.

"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay. I'll go to the hospital."

He let her take his good arm and lead him to the truck, opening the door and helping him with the old lap belt. After she had shut the door and started back around to the driver's side, Tom heard a helicopter in the sky, the quick, steady whop-whop-whop of the blades, the sound of a weak heart in a running man's chest. Probably a police helicopter checking the aftermath of the storm. He laid his head against the cool window and gazed up. The ground light cast a pale glow on the night sky. The helicopter flew closer and closer, until it was hovering right above them. But Tom still couldn't see it. All he could see was Sidney standing in front of the truck, washed in a clean spotlight. She shielded her eyes and looked upward, slowly waving her hand, gazing at something he couldn't see, perfectly at ease for the moment.