Self Checkout

Old man Brenner stood in the center of his garage and looked around to make sure everything was ready. He had parked the car in the street to make room and had lined the floor and one wall with a double layer of painters plastic just to be sure. A plastic lawn chair was in the center of the floor and next to it was a small wooden table.

On the table was a pistol that the old man had taken from a dead soldier when he was a young man in the war. I took that when we stormed the German blockade. He would say holding a beer at the VFW in the years following the war. I took if off the sniper who shot Jimmy. Jimmy’s okay though, was a through and through in the arm . Ya, he owns a bar in Pennsylvania. Jimmy was gone now though. Time and alcohol did what the sniper could not and in the end it may be that the snipers way would have been better than for Jimmy to die legless from diabetes surrounded by strangers in a sterile white room.

He picked up the pistol and admired it, taking comfort from its weight. Sometimes he would pull it out to remind himself that the stories he told were true. After all the years of telling them they had come to feel like stories and not the honest truth of what had been. They felt like something you see on tv.

Jimmy had really been shot by that sniper. Brenner really had killed that sniper and taken his pistol. He gave Jimmy the watch off of the dead bastard’s wrist. Jimmy wore that watch the rest of his life and was buried with it. Brenner held that pistol and thought of Jimmy. Hell yes. We were there and some of us made it home. Some came and lived a great long time after the war watching the world move on, watching as the people who knew us, truly knew and understood what we had been through died off one by one. When his wife died two months ago he decided right off that he couldn’t go on. She was the last one.

The world moved on and was too fast for him anyway. He couldn’t even understand how to buy groceries anymore. Some lines had tellers moving things across a scanner so fast that he couldn’t tell if he was being cheated or not. They were impatient with him when he started counting cash out of his wallet. Other aisles had no tellers in them. They expected you to be able to do it yourself. Someone was always trying to move the long lines of people into these aisles. He would try to ignore them. He didn’t understand the scanner. Couldn’t pay attention to the way he was holding something and watch the screen to know if the beep he heard – or thought he heard – came from the machine in front of him or from one of the twenty other machines around him. All those beeps ringing and those tellers with their fast hands and impatient eyes looking at him like he was stupid. It made him feel stupid.


None of it mattered now standing in the middle of his garage though. He felt free from it. No more trips to the mega-mart. No more struggling to get out of the car. No more people swerving their carts to get around him while he looked for the right kind of peanut butter. The kind she always knew to buy him. Chunky but not too chunky he would say. Perfect mix he would say. He never was able to find it once she was gone. Figured he would never have it again. Maybe there’s an old time corner grocery store on the other side and maybe she will have a perfect peanut butter sandwich for me when I get there.

He smiled as he went through the checklist in his head once again. Lights in the house were off and the doors were unlocked, note on the table. No long explanation, he wasn’t crying out for help. Just a quick note saying he was sorry for the mess he would leave behind and giving them permission to use what was in his bank account to bury him and instructions to give the rest away. And one line apologizing to his neighbor, a nice young man with a nice young family.

He sat in the chair and waited for his neighbor to return from work. He sat and thought about the men in his company. How they laughed and talked when they were on leave. How they laughed and talked in the years after the war about their brothers and times they shared. He hoped he could do that again. He hoped that somehow he could be with his wife again. He wanted them back. Wanted to be with them all again.

A car came rumbling down the ally and his neighbor’s garage door started grinding on its track. He picked up the pistol and was ready to go. The garage door grinding again on its track. He heard the door open and knew that his neighbor was as close as he was going to be. Better that the police were called right away. This way they wouldn’t find him days or weeks later. The old man had seen what that looked like in a war and he would just as soon spare everyone that.

A sharp report, a flash of light, and he was over.



End