The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 26: The Foyer
There was chaos in the foyer. Harry Maxwell was standing over a dead Ronnie Toledo. Tommy Maxwell was on the floor five yards from the couch, writhing in pain, a bullet lodged somewhere in his stomach. Angel had fled during the gunfire. Unfortunately, she wasn’t able to make it outside onto the vast grounds. Harry had chucked her back into the house as he wheeled and shot Toledo dead. Angel had been forced to run for the southern gothic stairwell and flee to the upper rooms of Humphrey’s mansion, as Harry’s attention was briefly diverted by his injured son.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” Harry wondered to a not listening, screaming in intense pain, Tommy. Tommy’s gun was lying on the floor next to him. Harry picked up Tommy’s gun and placed it lovingly in Tommy’s blood-soaked right hand (while Tommy kept his even more blood-soaked left hand on his continuing to bleed stomach wound).
Harry leaned in to Tommy to offer some reassuring fatherly words. “Don’t worry. I’m going to go get that cunt for you. Keep a lookout for that Abbott fellow down here.” Tommy nodded to his enraged father and watched as that enraged father promptly left him and charged up the stairs searching for his collateral.
Fingers and I watched the last part of this scene, hidden in one of the servant stairwells. We then watched Tommy slide himself slug-like across the floor leaving a trail of blood behind him as he went around to the front of the couch. And then with all of his strength lifted himself up to the couch and slouched into it half-laying, half-sitting in a lazy Sunday afternoon way as he looked out the open front door waiting for me to arrive. Tommy wasn’t screaming anymore but he was sort of grunting and moaning with every breath. This made it easy for Fingers to tiptoe behind him and put a gun to his temple.
“Don’t move or you’re dead.” Tommy didn’t move so Fingers didn’t shoot. Most likely it wasn’t the first time Fingers had said those words nor the first time that Tommy had heard them. Fingers reached around and took Tommy’s gun and handed it to me. “Remove the clip.” Fingers told me as he still held his gun to Tommy’s temple.
I looked at this foreign object in my hand and pulled on the end of the handle a little. Nothing happened. I turned the foreign object around and ended up back in the same position, so I pulled on the end of the handle again. Still nothing happened. I looked at Fingers, “I don’t know how to do that.” I never knew the term ‘look of death’ could be so literal but Fingers in that moment gave me a look that made me want to die, or at least apologize. I shrugged. And then threw the gun into an adjacent family room.
Fingers took his gun away from Tommy’s temple. (We really didn’t have to worry about Tommy at that moment because he was too busy trying to stop himself from bleeding to death and all to pose much of a threat to us.) Fingers came close to me, look of death still on his face, and whispered in what I felt was an unnecessarily condescending manner, “you do remember how to use that thing, don’t you,” gesturing towards the gun in my hand (the one I hadn’t thrown away), that felt kind of puny now compared to Tommy’s dispatched firearm.
“Of course.”
“Take the safety off.”
I took the safety off. (He had never taught me how to take the clip out of a gun, it wasn’t my fault!)
“You watch this one. I’m going upstairs.”
I nodded like I did on my first day in the Landmark mailroom when that schmuck Paul was showing me how to deliver the mail. The type of automatic nod that is expected of you in certain situations, the type of nod you do whether you can actually succeed at the task being given to you or not.
Fingers didn’t have time to double check with me, he had to go hunt Harry Maxwell and save Angel’s life, so I was pretty quickly left alone with a sweating, bleeding, cursing Tommy Maxwell. I walked around to the front of the couch to watch him eye to eye, man to man. I found a wicker chair that was in one of the large front bay windows for decoration and scooted it in front of the couch, about 7 and half yards away from Tommy.
Not long after sitting down and looking up to the empty stairwell and empty top of the stairwell a few times expecting to hear shots or to see a menacing Harry Maxwell or a running Angel or a happy Fingers reemerge, I started to have regrets about tossing Tommy’s handgun so cavalierly into the next room. This is because, like I said before, it felt more substantial and weighty (therefore I assume was more powerful) than the fairly lightweight one Fingers had given me. (Although my gun wasn’t the kind that a little old lady might keep in her purse, it wasn’t far enough away from such models to give me the type of confidence and swagger I needed at that moment.)
More importantly, I regretted throwing Tommy’s gun away because it seemed to strangely help him recover from his injuries. Instead of continuing to sweat, bleed and curse (well, he kept bleeding) Tommy managed to compose himself and his eyes now looked at that not very far away family room the way a hungry shark looks at some chum that had been accidentally tossed into the next door exhibit that featured cuddly fluffy seal pups. I don’t think the barrier (in this case, me) between the two enclosures was going to be enough to stop him from trying to go get it. I tried to look like every gangster in every film I had ever seen in an attempt to dissuade him from going after the gun. I don’t think I was convincing.
I don’t know what is or is not convincing about how one holds a gun. I mean, you just hold it and point it at someone, this should not give the person on the other end of the barrel any kind of confidence no matter how it is done. Unless maybe if the person holding the gun is shaking uncontrollably. But I wasn’t shaking. I was just holding the gun and this should not in and of itself given my inexperience away. Somehow I was giving my inexperience away, however, and Tommy was now very alert, not feeling the effects of the wound anymore. He was feeling my nervousness.
If I was a less moral person I would have shot him right then and there and been done with it. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that so I tried to improve my tough face, trying to look like I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if I had to while in actuality hesitating to kill him when I did indeed have to.
He slid off the couch to the floor and then moving in a slow-motion old-fashioned zombie kind of way started crawling towards that family room and the gun that was lying on the floor somewhere in that family room.
“I’m going to shoot you.” I shouted at him as he kept moving across the floor, blood draining out behind him. “If you don’t stop now. I will shoot you.” The second threat was no more effective than the first. He didn’t slow down (or speed up for that matter), he just continued crawling towards the room with a menacing smile on his face knowing what we both knew, that I wasn’t going to shoot him.
I had wasted precious seconds with my idle warnings and my futile attempts to threaten him back to the couch. He was now close enough to the room where I had thrown the gun I could no longer be certain that by sprinting past him I would get to the weapon before he could, it was just as likely (if the gun had landed near the front of the room) I would be sprinting into a smiling menacing handgun holding and shooting Tommy. I didn’t want to make myself an easier target so I came up with an alternative plan and sprinted in the other direction, away from Tommy and the family room and the gun, past the grand staircase, towards the back of the mansion.
My sprint began at the exact same time there was a loud crash from upstairs that sounded like a vase being smashed over somebody’s head. (This is because it was a vase being smashed over somebody’s head. Angel had been hiding in one of the many labyrinthine rooms up there and when she heard the footsteps of a man coming around the corner after her, she armed herself with a Wave Angel Tall Vase (by Katherine Pooley) and as the man walked into the room surprised him by smashing it harshly over his head and knocking him out. Unfortunately, the man was Fingers and not Harry Maxwell. Angel looked down at the resting Fingers. “Shit.” Then she took the gun from his limp hand before quickly getting out of there ahead of Harry Maxwell, who had certainly heard the crashing sound like everyone else in the mansion. Harry appeared only a few seconds after Angel disappeared from the room and like Angel looked down at the peacefully resting Fingers and for the second time that day said, “Who the fuck is this guy?”)
I was now hiding amidst a contemporary Italian dining set on the far side of the giant foyer, as far away from the family room and Tommy Maxwell as I could get while still keeping an eye on that family room (and theoretically Tommy Maxwell). Tommy was out of my sight and I assumed crawling around the room looking for the previously (and stupidly) discarded gun. I tried estimating how long it would take him to find it laying on the floor. My best guess was either one or two minutes. I needed to come up with something fast. A flash at the top of the stairwell disrupted my thinking. It was Angel, thankfully still alive, and now oddly with her own gun, which suspiciously looked like Fingers’ handgun. She rushed down the steps and I called to her and we embraced amidst the modern curvature and intelligent design of the dining set.
A shot shattered an ivory encrusted oval mirror on the wall behind us breaking up the tender moment. Tommy had found his gun. Thinking quickly, I turned over the dining table for us to hide behind.
“The bullets will go right through that thing,” Angel said alarmed and grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into the servants’ kitchen as Tommy fired a second poorly aimed shot that took out a limited edition figurine of a very famous cartoon character. The process of bleeding to death was, luckily for us (less luckily for him), making it difficult for him to target accurately. He started putting holes all over Humphrey’s dining room set and Angel started putting holes in the wall next to where Tommy was aiming and shooting from. It was a rather poor gunfight, I must say, as neither of them came close to hitting the other.
Harry Maxwell appeared at the top of the grand staircase, the next contestant to enter the arena. He quickly started shooting at us as well and had much better aim than the wounded Tommy, peppering the wood doorframe with bullet holes landing thumbnails away from our heads. The shootout had reached a standoff with Angel and I definitely at a disadvantage because Harry had the high ground and Tommy had command of the entire open foyer. We were pinned down in the little side kitchen and even though we both had guns Angel was really the only one that was firing back at the Maxwells trying to keep them from advancing on our position.
I looked around the service kitchen trying to find something, anything we could use to our advantage. There was an automatic nut milk maker from Soyabella and a Hemsley and Hensley spiralizer and a 7 quart oval cocotte. I couldn’t find any knives or bomb making materials or anything really useful at all. “Fuck.”
“Help me here!” Angel called as I took inventory of the contents of the service kitchen for a second futile time in the hopes of a miracle. We didn’t get a miracle. We got Fingers.
There was the roar of a mountain lion at the top of the staircase and then the sound of a very solid shoulder to midsection tackle and then the sound of the tumbling rocks of an avalanche (or the sound of tumbling human bodies down a grand southern gothic staircase).
All Maxwell shooting stopped as the loud thud of two cushioned skeletons hit the railing at the bottom of the steps hard. I thought I heard a neck snap. And then in perfectly clear, crisp, understandable Received Pronunciation English, we heard the shout of “Daddy!” from the other side of the foyer. Angel popped out from behind the doorframe of the service kitchen and without hesitation fired at the now exposed and distraught younger Maxwell, hitting him twice in the chest, his head bouncing off the ceramic floor tiling like a dropped barbell.
Angel kept the gun in front of her, I trailed behind holding the back of her shirt as we turned and approached the lumpen mess at the bottom of the staircase. 2 masses were entangled; a lithe, thin, wiry coil of barbed wire and a still intact boulder. We looked down at them. I looked up to the top of the seemingly ten story tall staircase. It was a very long tumble. I couldn’t see how a person could survive it. I looked back at the two men, expecting to see only death. But rocks are made to survive falls down mountains. Slowly, the boulder untangled himself from the barbed wire and then rolled the last step and stood up and limped towards us, passing us, to sit down on a J Marx Atelier Frame Dining Chair with 2 bullet holes in its top frame.
“Is he dead?” I asked the big man.
“Fingers nodded. “He’s dead. I snapped his neck.”
Angel wandered over to the other side of the foyer, to the body of Tommy, to make sure Maxwell #2 was dead as well while Fingers and I talked.
“How come you’re not dead? You took the same fall.”
Fingers looked up at me and smiled. “I’ve learned a few things over the years.”
“Like how to fall down a grand staircase?”
“Yeah, like how to fall down a grand staircase.”
I must say I was impressed. In the background Angel kicked Tommy repeatedly to make sure he wasn’t ever going to get up again. (Come to think about it, I don’t think the kicks were to make sure he was dead. I don’t want to know what they did to her in that day and a half they had her.)
“So did you learn how to clean up dead bodies, too?” I joked to Fingers.
“Of course, that’s the first thing you learn.” He was serious.
Angel returned, slightly limping (either from the kicks or the other excitement of the day), from getting her revenge on Tommy’s inanimate body. It was obviously wonderful, a miracle even, to see her alive, but she looked as beat up as Fingers after his fall. We all looked abused and battered, I suppose. (Okay, I still looked fine and remarkably untouched by the Battle of Humphrey Mansion but I did feel as bad as the 2 of them looked.)
“What are we going to do now?” Angel sat down on the matching J Marx Atelier Frame Dining Chair that had only one bullet hole in its top frame.
“There’s an ocean out back. That’s probably the best place to put them,” Fingers said as he flexed his left hand which had (ironically?) at least one broken finger on it.
“Won’t they wash up on shore?” Angel asked as she held her side like she had a broken rib or two.
“There’s ways to avoid that.”
“And we need to clean up all this blood,” I said looking down at the floor and remembering my time cleaning the Landmark bathrooms. It’s not easy getting blood stains out.
“I know a few tricks for that, too.” Fingers was just full of answers. He got up and walked over to Harry Maxwell’s body and took him by the legs. “Come on. Let’s get to work. Help me drag these bodies outside.” Angel went to help him and took the top part of Harry. I stayed in the center of the foyer looking at the blood and the bullet holes.
Both Fingers and Angel turned to me annoyed as they started to move Harry Maxwell. “Aren’t you going to help?”
“No.”
“No?!” They cried in unison.
“I have another idea.”