Hic Rhodus, New Jersey
new fiction by Brian Rawlins
Jimmy Dillard lay in bed staring up at the water stain, listening to the big rigs on the interstate, wondering if there existed an advanced mental technique that would allow him to erase memories, a Jedi-like power that could pop unwanted rememberings like pimples. One day, he would look into that.
It was 5:14 AM, still pitch black outside. Jimmy could see the stain because of the flickering LED light outside his apartment, which was right next to the New Jersey turnpike. During the six months he had been an Amazon truck robber, this was the longest he’d lain there, after the alarm sounded at 5 AM, staring up at the stain.
For weeks now, Jimmy had been waking up from dreams of Annabelle with such sadness that he would drag his feet to meet Carlos for pancakes and coffee at Denny’s, where they would discuss Marx and the next Amazon truck they were going to rob. Heartbreak was starting to interfere with the redistribution of wealth.
Last night, in his dream, Annabelle showed up in the Amazon truck while Jimmy was unloading the soon-to-be redistributed cargo. After he hefted out a plasma TV, he turned to grab another package, and in its place: Annabelle. He gripped her arms and tried to lift her, so he could steal her too, but she was stuck to the truck. Jimmy lifted so hard a shockwave of pain shot through his spine, ejecting him back into the waking world around 2:30 AM. After that, he never really fell back asleep.
It was a twenty-minute drive down the Jersey turnpike to Denny’s, so Jimmy was really cutting it close by continuing to lie there in bed. The meeting time was 6 AM, on the dot, just minutes before sunrise. Carlos insisted that Marxist revolutionaries start their day with the sunrise. Carlos’ father, also a Marxist, spent a month in the Ecuadorian jungle with Che, who believed the sight of that fire (the sun) igniting in the sky was guaranteed to ignite the fire in a man’s soul. Therefore, Carlos considered a late arrival to breakfast a serious offense that communicated a lack of commitment to The Cause. Jimmy didn’t want to communicate that. The Cause was the best thing that had happened to him since Annabelle Simmons.
Then, at 5:16 AM, an angry blast from a tractor trailer’s horn pierced Jimmy’s brain, alerting him that he was toying with his destiny by staying there in bed. He ducked into his bathroom, half the size of a gas station’s, but with a shower. He disrobed, stepped into his tiny washing area, grabbed the wooden spoon that hung from the shower head by a strand of twisted manila rope, put it in his mouth, and bit down on it, hard, like someone on the receiving end of a primitive surgical procedure. With his teeth digging into the spoon, Jimmy swiped the crusty, green bar of Irish Spring from the soap dish, and spun the water knob.
Ice cold water pelted his face. Jimmy hadn’t paid the gas bill in two months. Taking a cold shower in November in a New Jersey apartment which had no heat was akin to being stabbed by a thousand needles. Biting on the wooden spoon helped. Jimmy had enough money to pay the bill now, barely, but starting his days in this way made him feel stronger, more revolutionary.
Jimmy sped through the washing, not only because it was painfully chilly, but also because he wasn’t a fan of his naked body. He didn’t feel it represented the man of strength and higher calling that he felt himself to be these days. The body was too scrawny, too…accidental. He was going to start doing pushups, probably tomorrow. Following the shower, Jimmy hurried to get his body into his uniform. In his closet, there hung three pairs of Dickies work pants, three blue Dickies work shirts, and nothing else.
The uniform was actually Jimmy’s idea, but Carlos decided they should throw out all their other clothes. This was great for Jimmy because it eliminated the stress of having to choose outfits. Jimmy was never quite sure what article of clothing said “This is me, Jimmy Dillard. I’m the kind of guy who wears this,” so he mainly stuck with band shirts. Metallica and Megadeth seemed to know exactly who they were, and Jimmy was happy to align himself with the identities of James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine.
On the pre-dawn turnpike, Jimmy drove five miles over the speed limit. He was willing to take that risk to show up on time. Up until this morning, he had avoided all behavior that could put him on the authorities’ radar. Obviously, a speeding ticket wouldn’t be a serious crime, but it would put Jimmy’s existence and his face in the mind of a police officer. He didn’t want that.
He gripped the steering wheel tight, constantly checked the rearview for cops. He found the strict adherence to under-the-radar behavior invigorating. It made life feel special. The only other time Jimmy had felt like that was when he was with Annabelle. During those first months, she made everything feel like an adventure, or some kind of secret spy mission, even a trip to the grocery store. But that’s in the past now.
On this morning’s faster than normal journey to Denny’s, Jimmy stayed focused on the exploited, early-morning commuters and big rig drivers, on their devil’s bargain to trade their time for an unlivable wage, on the toxic fossil fuels powering the movement of so many unnecessary consumer goods. “You have nothing to lose but your chains,” Jimmy said out loud to all the suffering souls on the New Jersey turnpike. Carlos told Jimmy that Marx quote when they first met at the unemployment office. At the time, Jimmy was sleeping in his car, so he didn’t have any actual stuff to lose, but he definitely wanted to lose the chains that anchored his heart to Annabelle, who, by that time, had run away to the other side of the country to live with a rodeo star.
When Jimmy pulled into the Denny’s parking lot, having successfully evaded the law, he could see Carlos already sitting in their booth. Unlike Jimmy, Carlos was a rotund man with a thick mop of black hair that made him look feral and passionate. He was talking to Sandra, the waitress.
Sandra laughed at something Carlos said. Sitting there watching them, Jimmy felt like there was nothing else in the world to think about. Those months when he lived in his car, alone with his mind, were some of the most terrifying times he had experienced, other than those twenty four hours when he couldn’t find Annabelle, before he got the call from Montana. But not from her, from Tyler, the rodeo star, who started off the call by saying, “Annabelle wanted me to call you because she loves you.”
Jimmy looked at his watch and saw that he only had two minutes. He exited his Honda, hurried up to the front door and stepped into Denny’s right at 6 AM. “Morning, Jimmy. Coffee’s on the table.” Sandra said, from behind the counter.
Sandra used adjectives judiciously. Most things she told Jimmy and Carlos were neither good nor bad. They just were. However, most of the information she divulged was, objectively, bad.
“Good morning, Sandra,” Jimmy said.
“Usual?”
“Yes, please.”
That simple exchange, that knowledge of what he liked to have for breakfast made Jimmy feel like he was walking into a command center where everybody was engaged in the same mission for the greater good. The other customers at Denny’s at 6 AM were long distance truckers, a couple tweakers, and lonely men on their way to blue collar jobs. To Jimmy, though, they were the family members of The Cause. “Well, look who decided to show up,” Carlos said from the booth.
Eager to hear today’s revolutionary pontifications, Jimmy marched to the booth. The second he was seated, Carlos said, “Look at me.”
Jimmy was already looking at him, but he understood he needed to look at Carlos in such a way that offered a perspective into his soul, which Jimmy wasn’t quite ready to do just yet because he hadn’t even had his pancakes. Nevertheless, he did what he could, and looked into Carlos’ deep brown eyes.
Carlos stared back into Jimmy’s eyes. Once he had collected the information from Jimmy’s soul that he needed, which took almost a full minute, he leaned back and said, “Okay. Okay. Looks like we can move forward.”
“With what?” Jimmy asked, as he took a sip of coffee.
“With what we do, brother. With what we do.”
Carlos turned his attention to the window, to the first slippage of daylight into the dim sky.
“Got a text from a Little Birdy this morning,” Carlos said.
For the last six months, the way it had been working was that Carlos would get a feeling it was time to rob another truck. Then, he would let The Little Birdy know, with a text that said “the time was right for giving.” After a couple days, The Little Birdy would text Carlos back, around 5AM, with an address, the truck’s first stop. The Little Birdy worked at the Amazon warehouse. This morning was the first break from that order of operations. Having zero pre-robbery mental prep days made Jimmy very uneasy. He held up his coffee cup so Sandra could bring him a refill, even though he had taken only one sip.
“You never told me you had a feeling,” Jimmy said, trying to hide his sickening fear.
“The Birdy wouldn’t have chirped if there wasn’t something well worth our time,” Carlos said.
“Right,” Jimmy said over his thundering heartbeats.
“Hic Rhodus, hic salta,” Carlos said with revolutionary gusto.
Jimmy forgot what that meant, but he didn’t want to ask. He wanted Carlos to think he was reading his Marx, religiously, every day, which he was, though, as of late, he’d only been getting through a paragraph a day. He wished Karl had used a simpler language to explain things like commodity fetishism.
“Is it cold?” Sandra asked, looking down at Jimmy’s cup that didn’t need a refill. “Just wanted a little top up,” Jimmy said.
“Let me speak to management. You deserve PTO. We won’t stand for this,” Carlos declared.
“Cute,” Sandra said and then proceeded to pour the tiniest amount of coffee into Jimmy’s cup before she walked away, with a slight limp.
“There’s a revolutionary in that woman that’s just waiting to get out and change history,” Carlos proclaimed.
“She’s got a limp,” Jimmy said.
“The limpin’ proletariat,” Carlos said, very proud of his seemingly erudite joke. By now, the sun was beginning to rise in New Jersey. Carlos and Jimmy turned to look out the window. To the rising sun, to the world, to himself, and to Jimmy Dillard, Carlos said, “Here is Rhodes, Jimmy. Jump here!”
Che was right; watching the sun rise did make a man feel like his day, and his life, were destined for great things, but it also made Jimmy realize he was just a thing on a planet, which was a strange, confounding mystery, and that thought actually made him feel like a small and insignificant accident. Jimmy hoped his pancakes would extinguish the anxiety in the pit of his stomach before he robbed his sixth Amazon truck with Carlos Lazarte.
* * *
The pancakes made Jimmy sleepy. Weighed down by batter and syrup, his eyes fluttered as he drove their van down Eugene Lane. On robbery days, Jimmy always got a grapefruit, sunny side up eggs and bacon. A lighter breakfast made him feel nimble and athletic. But Carlos’ announcement was unexpected. With only one more turn to go before they were on the same street as the Amazon truck, Jimmy was feeling like he would rather be back in bed.
Carlos, on the other hand, was fully ignited. He polished his Snoopy mask with vigor, as he always did. Carlos felt it was of the utmost importance to have a spotless Snoopy mask for every robbery. Even though Snoopy was a dog, and was often featured with dirt on his face, a spotless Snoopy face communicated that the man underneath the mask had a reverence for the cartoon animal, and thus made the Amazon drivers feel like their robbers cared about the beloved cartoon dog as much as everybody did. Being held at gunpoint was an unnerving situation, but having Snoopy’s clean face in front of you, while Charlie Brown took your stuff, made the drivers feel that “we are good people doing this for the right reasons,” Carlos often reminded Jimmy. We have Peanuts on our side!
As they neared the turn, Carlos took the Charlie Brown mask out of the glove compartment, gave it a quick wipe down and handed it to Jimmy. Jimmy took it, and studied it like it was an artifact from someone else’s life.
“You ready?” Carlos asked.
He was as far away from ready as he’d ever been. All he could do now was brace himself.
“We can turn around, if you want,” Carlos said.
Carlos had never said that before. Was he really giving Jimmy an out? Or was this all a test to see if Jimmy truly had the soul of a revolutionary?
“We need to go into this as two men who are ignited, Jimmy. It can’t just be one of us. A wick with no flame is just…a limp string with wax on it. It’s useless.” Jimmy didn’t want to be cast back into the days of being a limp string, the days of being unignited, causeless. He wasn’t returning to that sorry state. “I’m a wick on fire,” Jimmy proclaimed.
“Alright, then, Charlie Brown, let’s get to work,” Carlos said as he put on his Snoopy mask.
Jimmy made the turn. Five houses down, their target: the Amazon truck. Seeing it there, full of wealth ready to be redistributed, speeded up Jimmy’s digestion so that the pancakes were now less of a burden on his energy levels. But then, they saw the driver. This driver was not like any of the other drivers the Marxists had robbed. This driver looked strong enough that he could bench press Jimmy, like he was just the bar, with none of the weights on it.
Jimmy eased off the gas.
He and Carlos watched this muscular man, carrying a huge package like it was a notebook, walk with assurance and purpose across the front yard. Every other driver they robbed walked like they were desperate not to be around any more packages, which they were. This man, he walked in a…soldierly way.
Jimmy felt it. The cabin pressure in the truck changed. A gust of wind nearly extinguished Carlos’ flame. Jimmy wanted Carlos to say something. He begged destiny to do something, but Snoopy’s head was immobile. It just stared straight ahead at the muscular soldier in a blue Amazon vest marching across the lawn. “Is that the right truck?” Jimmy asked.
“Yes,” Carlos said.
If Carlos made the retreat decision, then that would cause irreparable damage to his soul. Carlos said nothing. Jimmy decided he was going to handle it. He was about to say, “I can’t do this,” but as he turned to face Snoopy’s head to say that, he caught a glimpse of Annabelle in the back, stuck to the truck. That pain from 2:30 AM shot through his spine, and without thinking he said,
“We are big too.”
Carlos, now utterly disoriented, looked over at the young man through his Snoopy mask.
“Hic Rhodus, hic salta,” Jimmy said.
There was quiet as the men shared another long look into each other’s eyes, though this time Carlos, his eyes visible in Snoopy’s eyes, was not holding the powerful inquisitor’s gaze, as he had done at Denny’s, but neither was Jimmy. In each man’s eyes, a dangerous curiosity shone, a spiritual Russian roulette was taking place. Jimmy had spun the chamber of the gun and laid it on the table.
“Hic Rhodus, hic salta,” Carlos said.
Jimmy’s prayers had been answered. Destiny had taken over. Jimmy knighted himself in Charlie Brown’s head, and pressed back down on the gas.
Brian Rawlins’ flash fiction has appeared in New World Quarterly, Maudlin House, and Flash Fiction Magazine. Brian is also a WGA screenwriter who co-wrote the thriller movie, Blumhouse’s UNSEEN, and sold a horror project to Paramount Pictures. Brian’s work is driven by a fascination with guilt, trauma, power, and survival in contemporary America, often expressed through a darkly comic lens.
