“Threat Level: Delta” originally appeared in Totally.
Sherman’s uncles Rod and Steve were grade-A fuckups. Sherman’s mom knew it, his Nana Lottie and Poppy Arne knew it, even Rod and Steve knew it. Hell, they didn’t just know it, it was the thing they loved best about themselves. Just about the only person who didn’t know it was Sherman. They were the two coolest dudes he’d ever met.
Sherman was crazy about his uncles. He was crazy about riding around with them in Rod’s old primer gray Nova. They even let little Sherman sit up front on the vast bench seat sandwiched in between them, and this was Sherman’s favorite place to be in the whole world. His mom hated it but Rod said he didn’t give a crap, Sherman was going to sit up front with his uncles like a man. They even put him in charge of the radio while they smoked menthols and told stories about bands they’d gone to see and their many girlfriends. If Sherm put on a song they didn’t approve of, they let him know right away that pussy shit was not appreciated in the Nova and to keep the dial moving. Desperate for their approval, he gladly obliged. With rare exceptions for extraordinary moods, pussy shit, apparently, was anything that wasn’t Metallica, Led Zeppelin, or AC/DC.
A few times a week, Rod and Steve would pick Sherman up at home, ask him if he was ready for a burnout, which he always was, and then go tear-assing over to the Munch Box for chilidogs and sometimes to their friend Gordo’s house to watch him play drums. According to Steve, Gordo played just as good as Lars Ulrich did, maybe even a little better. By the time Sherman was 11 they had him doing beer runs. They’d park in back of a gas station or convenience store and send him out stealth-style to grab a twelver and then book it back to the idling Nova. The first time he did one he was nervous as hell, but after that one time it came easy. Soon he was even giving himself little challenges, like he’d have to run out of the store backwards or tell the clerk ahead of time that he planned on stealing the beer just to see what he’d do. “Hey, shit for brains!” he yelled at this one dude while holding the beers up over his head. “I’m gonna take this beer!” Then he hauled ass outside and jumped in the Nova and Rod did a victory burnout while Steve whooped and shouted “Hell yeah, little man!” The dude didn’t even chase him. In fact, none of the clerks ever caught him. Rod and Steve agreed that Sherm was a natural. After the beer runs they’d drive to the quarry where his uncles would let him drink half a beer and afterwards throw a bunch of crap into the water for their amusement.
One day when Sherman was 13, they were again at the quarry looking out at the still water, framed by the sharp angles of the cut limestone walls, only Rod was quieter than usual. Steve asked him what was up and Rod said he’d knocked up his girlfriend Destiny and that he was going to have to make himself scarce for a while.
“You sure this is the kind of thing you want to talk about in front of…” Steve asked, nodding at Sherman.
“He’s gonna have to learn about real life shit eventually,” Rod said.
But Sherman already knew about real life shit because his own dad had made himself scarce before he was born. Whenever his name came up, Rod and Steve made sure to mention how they couldn’t hate Sherman’s dad for taking off because they would’ve done the same thing. It just sucked that it had happened to their own sister, was all.
“Well,” Steve said, “why don’t you just take her to get an aborsh’?”
“She wants to keep it,” Rod said. “No way in hell I’m signing on for that mess.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “That’s no kind of thing to get volunteered for.”
“She’ll probably try to get her retard stepdad to kick my ass.”
“God damn,” Steve said. “Probably not a bad idea to split for a while.”
“No shit,” Rod said. “Threat Level: Delta.” That was the name of their favorite movie and over the years it had morphed into a code for unpleasant situations.
“Threat Level: Delta,” Steve said back.
The thought of how he’d miss Rod crept lopsided into Sherman along with the warmth of the half a beer he’d drunk. He wandered away from the car and located a pile of jackhammered concrete with bits of rebar sticking out, most likely dumped there by some contractor too cheap to pay for a dumpster. He picked up the biggest piece he could manage and hucked it by its tail into the quarry. Rod and Steve said nothing as it sailed over the limestone lip and whooshed down into the brightblue water. It made a deep, hollow sound when it hit, which rung out and echoed for moment even over the music coming loud and perfect out of the Nova’s speakers, but then the echoes were swallowed up by the music, its own echo slapping the rock walls like it was more than just one band. Like it was so many bands, so many guitars and drums all playing one song, all just slightly out of synch.
The next Sunday Rod packed up the Nova and left. He called Sherman to say goodbye but didn’t come to the house. For a few weeks after, Steve still stopped by to see him but without Rod it wasn’t the same. Soon enough he stopped coming around on weekday nights, and then he stopped coming around altogether. They hadn’t heard anything from Rod for a while by then and Sherman’s grandparents had begun to worry. He’d sent a couple postcards from Myrtle Beach and then, later, further north, but eventually the postcards stopped coming. Sherman continued doing the beer runs on his own, growing ever bolder in their execution until one day he’d thrown a brick at an elderly clerk and tried to make off with a pony keg of Schlitz. He knew his uncles would be proud of him for that one. He was dragging the keg down the road when the clerk, bleeding from a gash on his forearm, caught up to him in his pickup and kicked Sherman in the balls and relieved him of the scuffed up keg. After that he took to moping in his room where cases of beer were piled high along one wall.
His mom woke him late one night. For a moment Sherman didn’t know where he was. The dark bedroom offered no clues and, still half in a dream, he thought he was underwater. Not drowning, only submerged. As if in an embrace. She told him, as he came fully awake, that his Uncle Steve was in the hospital. They had to go right away. A cop was there at the house and he told them that Steve had gone after Destiny’s stepdad, a guy called Willie Sundown. He’d shown up at their house drunk off his tits, swinging a crowbar. Willie Sundown had taken it away from him and used it to severely beat his ass.
At the hospital, an older doctor, his hair nearly white, told them that Steve had a broken pelvis and bleeding on the brain. He would probably be okay, the doctor said, as long as his brains didn’t swell too much, but if it turned out they did swell they’d have to do surgery to take out part of his skull to ease the pressure. This was a pretty straightforward operation, he said. They’d just have to keep an eye on him for a few days. The doctor said they could go see him if they wanted, but that he was on a lot of pain meds and would be pretty out of it. They found him alone in a dark room, quiet but awake, his right eye swollen completely shut, his head wound in layers of bandages, and wearing a pair of plaster pants. Sherman wanted to cry but couldn’t do it in front of Steve. It took Steve a moment to realize who it was that had come in. “Oh, hey,” he croaked.
Sherman’s mom began to cry. Steve said for her to wait in the hallway because he had something to tell Sherman in private. “Guys only,” he said.
When she was gone he turned vaguely in Sherman’s direction. “Where are you, Shermie?” he wheezed. “I can’t see you so come closer.”
Sherman moved towards the bed, great fear and pity sloshing around inside him, and when Steve held out a shaky arm, he took it.
“Your Uncle Rod is dead,” Steve said, a sob escaping his throat.
A tremendous wave of pain struck Sherman in the chest and for a moment his vision was clouded over by black smears. His uncle’s hand was fever-hot and he squeezed Sherman’s hand tightly, straining to not let him go so he wouldn’t fall.
“That bitch’s stepdad killed him, I know it.”
“No,” Sherman whispered once his vision returned. “That’s not true.”
“It is true,” Steve said. “It is. Now I need you to break me out of here so we can get revenge on them, okay?”
“But you’re hurt,” Sherman said. “You can’t walk.”
“Bullshit,” Steve said. “I’m okay.”
Sherman said nothing. He only felt the sick heat of Steve’s meaty hand and an awful twisting in his stomach for thinking that Rod was dead. Where had things gone so wrong? He wanted to show Steve all the beers in his room that he’d stolen for the three of them.
“What you’re gonna do is later when your mom’s asleep, you get her car, I know you can drive it, okay? And you come here at like 5am and I’ll be waiting out back.”
“Uncle Steve,” Sherman pleaded.
“No, you’re doing it and that’s all. 5am. You be here in that god damn Tercel.”
Then his mom came back in and said that they had to go. The doctor had told her Steve needed his rest but that they could come back in the morning to see him again. Steve gave Sherman’s hand one more squeeze to let him know he was serious about his plan. On the way home, Sherman’s mom drove with one hand while with the other she continually wiped tears from her eyes. Even together, they were only this small thing moving a tiny, almost imperceptible distance under a vast black sky.
“Mom…” he said. She looked at him and forced a tight smile. Then she turned back to the road and they continued on through the sleeping town.
“It’s going to be okay, baby,” she said.
At 4:30, Sherman snuck the car keys off the hook by the door and went outside. He put the driver’s seat all the way forward, started the car, and took off. In the rearview he saw his mom running out of the house in her old sweats, she called out to him but then he turned the corner and when he looked into the mirror again she was gone. Ahead of him was only the street and the place farther ahead where it met the dark of the sky.
When Sherman pulled up behind the hospital, Steve was there waiting for him. He was sitting in a wheelchair with several hospital blankets draped over his shoulders and was smoking a cigarette. Sherman helped him into the car, no easy feat due to Steve’s weight and the cast around his midsection. He was clammy with sweat and moaned something awful the whole time. When Steve was settled in the passenger seat, Sherman folded up the wheelchair and put it in the trunk and they drove off. It took Steve a while to get his breath back. When he did, he told Sherman that the first thing they needed to do was get a can of gasoline.
“Uncle Steve,” Sherman pleaded, “I don’t think I can do…”
“Bullshit,” Steve cut him off with a trembling voice. “You’re gonna do it. I can’t do it by myself. I’ve got a gas can at my place.”
Sherman turned the car towards Steve’s apartment. “Put something on the radio, man,” Steve said softly like he was falling asleep. Sherman’s mom had only lame stations in the pre-sets, nothing but pussy shit, so it took him a minute to find something that wouldn’t bum Steve out. Finally he landed on some Zeppelin.
“Listen to that,” Steve whispered as John Bonham destroyed his drums during a wild solo. “Sounds like a heart, right? Listen to it. It’s like something that’s struggling, going all weak but then strong again and you know he’s gonna make it.” Sherman listened to the drumming coming on in irregular waves. It did sound like a struggling heart. He wanted John Bonham to quit fucking around, to just keep time, to be strong and reliable. But he wouldn’t do it. He kept drumming in that same strange, unpredictable way. First one thing, then another, but always somehow part of the same whole and this caused an awful tension inside Sherman.
He stopped in front of Steve’s place. He was scared, of course, but he also thought he could do what they needed to do. Sherman turned to his uncle. “Want me to get the gas can?” he asked. But Steve only sat there, pale and still now, staring straight ahead with his one unswollen eye already clouded over. He wasn’t breathing. When the song was over, Sherman turned off the radio and looked straight ahead as well until his own breathing calmed and the sound of it, deep and even, filled the car. In the quiet he could feel his own heart beating and, in a way, it was as though the song had not ended but had finally, thankfully, resumed keeping regular time.
He didn’t know where else to go, so he drove to the quarry. It was starting to get light, nothing more, though, than a thin and tentative brightening, barely yet noticeable. Sherman wished for half a beer and a chilidog, a burnout in the Nova. In the early morning chill, he worked up a sweat getting Steve out of the passenger seat and back into the wheelchair. Sherman wondered if this cold inert thing was even still his uncle. Stiff and lifeless, but still meaty. Sherman was so scrawny. It still smelled like Steve, though. Sweat, cigarettes, and a faint whiff of gasoline. Just like Rod. The brothers shared this smell and Sherman wondered if maybe it continued to linger around Rod as well, in whatever way it could.
He rolled the chair to the edge of quarry, and he and Steve faced the water that was so calm it looked to Sherman like flawless black glass stretching out away from them. The sky grew lighter by small degrees. He sat down and hugged his own arms against the cold, the sweat chilling his back, and dreamed of doing beer runs that were even more daring. Getting caught just one time? That was nothing. He’d go back and he’d get away with a full keg next time. He’d beat that old cashier’s ass. After a while, he stood up again and, almost without thinking, pushed the chair over the quarry’s lip. Almost as if his uncle was another beer bottle or chunk of broken concrete, another memory to deposit here in tribute to their time together or at least in tribute to something. Sherman didn’t watch Steve fall but the splash echoed like a drumbeat repeating, strong and, for a few seconds at least, reliable, going out to somewhere he didn’t know but then returning to him, not diminished only different.