A Big Red Sign (Short Story)

Writers write what they know, and so as a result, you can find a lot of fiction narrated by a lot of vaguely fictional writers. And, almost invariably, you'll get at least a reference to the fact that the vaguely whitewashed author surrogate in question liked to tell stories as a child. Almost inevitably, someone in the story will notice, too, and suggest that bright-eyed little Johnny SwearImadehimup ought to be a writer.

I was never like that, and nothing like that ever happened to me. It's not that I didn't have stories. I had plenty of stories. I had a whole roster of action heroes and a whole roster of sports heroes all made up in my head. Even my lego men had two decades of backstory minimum, and a wizard was an excuse to invent four hundred years' worth. I just never told my stories.

The first time that I got any inkling that I had an unusual affinity for story was in fifth grade, when we were assigned to write a one-page short story. Almost everyone in my class complained about this onerous task. I didn't object, but you have to understand, it wasn't because I was a writer. It was because my best friend in class was the smartest, and he didn't complain. I was second-smartest, and felt I should hold up my end by not complaining, either.

It's also worth noting that everybody else brought in a story that was just under one page, except my friend and I. His was just over two pages. Mine was pushing ten, a fact that could not possibly have gone unnoticed. Even then, though, nobody commented positively on the story. They just wondered why I bothered to write so much. I'm not sure what I answered, but I know that it was because the story wasn't over yet.

There was a time when I wrote because my parents wanted me to practice typing. What they really wanted was for me to complete one of these computer programs that teaches you typing lessons, but I don't think anything in the world could be more boring than that. If it came down to a choice between trying to write an adolescent, escapist, poorly-plotted, action-heavy science fiction trilogy and taking lessons from a machine reading a $5 CD, well, I was an adolescent. What choice did you think I was going to make?

I picked up that trilogy again in high school when my English teacher told me I'd be in for massive amounts of extra credit if I managed to write a novel, no matter how bad it was. Over the years, I wrote a lot of things for school credit, and some of them I put time and effort into and really enjoyed, but I still only saw myself as a student and not a writer. I was a student who enjoyed his assignments more than it was politic to let on, sure, but still just a student.

In college, being a student meant acting like a writer, or at least drinking like one. I read the classics with a glass of wine, the modernists with a bottle of whiskey, and the postmodernists with six-packs of awful, mass-produced beer. Just to put my own personal touch on it, I would read pulp when I had the runs. Stopping to go to the bathroom every ten minutes heightened the suspense. As a matter of course, I wrote poetry and then read it at open mics. I didn't like that even when I was into it. It was just the thing to do.

Before I was willing to admit there was no money in it, and before my wife was pregnant enough for the appeal of steady employment to sink in, I wrote fiction. It wasn't good fiction, and as I mention, it wasn't lucrative. I wrote it under a pseudonym, so hardly anybody I know is aware of it. Occasionally, I'll slip some mention of my old work into conversation, just to see what people think of it. So I've noticed, over the years, that there's one thing about my fiction that people invariably hate. They picked up on a pattern in my writing, and I picked up on a pattern in their taste.

I had a very transparent habit of killing off a certain character type. Any time one character was noticeably kind, innocent and likeable, it was a sure bet that they would get killed off. If you were the clearly and by far the best (invented) human being in any of my novels, short stories, even long poetry, you were totally fucked. Looking back now, I know that it's because one of the three best people I ever knew died young when I was seventeen. It didn't happen right in front of me, but I was too close to it not to be affected, and it came out in my writing. So I guess, for a while, I wrote to deal with that.

The other two in my top three are alive and well–thirty years older than me and likely to outlive me anyway–so I suppose that's one author's lousy fiction you won't have to wade through at the bookstore ever again.

Ever since Edwin was born, it has become an undeniable fact that I've gotten in the habit of writing because (and only if) there's a paycheck in it. This has become increasingly the case. At first, I was conspicuously aware of journalism as a new challenge and as something new to learn. Eventually, though, it just became what I do. It has reached the point now that if they had stopped paying me for it last week, I probably would have stopped writing six days ago, never to start again.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that unlike so many other writers, I can't point at one moment that truly set me on the path to being a writer. I can, however, point to the moment that pointed me away.

Working for the newspaper, I've written about a lot of things. I wrote a series of articles when a trigger-happy bank robber was still at large and committing a series of robberies. I covered the shooting that happened at our high school a couple of years ago. There was even the time that my next-door neighbor thought he killed a man in the next neighborhood over and then came home to find the man slumped dead over his kitchen table. It sounds like another one of my half-baked short-stories, but I promise I'm not making it up. It actually happened, and I was more pleased than I care to think on to have gotten that scoop hours ahead of any of the TV stations. Suffice it to say that I have been turning police reports into front page articles for more than a decade now.

It was that reputation that led the managing editor to send me out to the Crawford murder. Technically, it was Callahan's turn, but I was the one who went.

When I got to the Crawford house, it was all roped off with that yellow tape, which I expected. Standard crime scene stuff. You couldn't really tell what was going on inside the house, although I did overhear the a uniformed officer use the words “dismemberment” and “all over the living room.” Over the years, I have become something of an expert in the field of overhearing uniformed officers. Drew Crawford, who was a couple grades ahead of my Stephen in school, was sitting on the front stoop in handcuffs.

If the detective in charge of the scene was inside the house, I was just going to have to wait until he came out. The garage door was open, though, and there was already something of a commotion around it. A line of police officers had formed to keep the neighbors and various passersby from crowding around and seeing inside, but standing back from the commotion, I could catch glimpses of what was going on inside. It looked like the entire interior had been painted a very dark shade of red. Someone from the crime scene unit even game out with a paintbrush and a bucket sealed in separate evidence bags.

That was not nearly as disturbing as what happened next. The Crawford kid had been watching the police intently when I got there, but as I was walking up onto the driveway to talk to one of the officers, I guess I caught his eye and he recognized me. He rushed up to the yellow tape, although he didn't make any effort to break through it. He just stood there for a second, staring at me and grinning. Then he began half-singing, half shouting at me.

“Half for work, and half for play, then sleep like a baby to wrap up the day!”

As the officers were grabbing him and pulling him back, he made no move to resist. He just grinned at me again. And then he winked.

I couldn't write about that with the detached, journalistic pen of a newsman. I couldn't write about it in a way that only seemed to matter. It couldn't be just a job, just the paycheck, just another day. It had to be anything but. Instead, went down to the bar and spent most of the night drinking, and after the bartender kicked me out to close up, I spent the rest of it writing this.

I really, sincerely hope it is the last thing I ever write.