Edge/Water
CHAPTER 1
SHOT
Surprisingly, getting shot in the leg didn’t hurt as much as Morgan thought it would. Oh, don’t get him wrong, it hurt like hell. Like fuckshitgoddamitshitmotherfucker-on-a-stick type of hurt. Hurt enough to make him utter vile, sexually explicit remarks about his own mother, of whom he was actually quite fond. Hurt enough for him to smash his arm down in painful fury on the wooden floor of the elevated train platform on which he was now lying and, in the process, break his fairly expensive watch, a gift from a former girlfriend who had thrown it at his head during their final argument but he had someone managed to snag it with one hand out of the air. So, yes, getting shot in the leg hurt like hell. And yet…
Not that Morgan had any previous experience in getting shot. Before this particular Saturday night he hadn’t even known anyone who had actually been shot, despite living in the shooting gallery known as Chicago. With more than 400 murders in a year and who-knows-how-many non-fatal shootings, he calculated through his pain that he, by all rights, should know at least one person who had gotten winged, or at the very least, been on the introductory end of a bullet himself.
Still, in his relatively upward-trending neighborhood (median income $55,000 a year), you could lift your window to catch a summer breeze and not have to wait long to hear the distinct snap of bullets exiting the barrel of a gun somewhere across the horizon. Even from his 11th floor apartment, one of many multi-story human beehives that co-mingled with modest three-stories and single family homes in the neighborhood, he could hear the gunshots while he watched “The X Files” or even “The Sopranos.”
But his daily walks from his apartment to the elevated train station were surprisingly relatively uneventful and merely involved fighting his way past the always busy liquor store (the one with a piece of masking tape stretched across the check-out counter upon which the owner had written. “We do not accept money with blood on it.”). He negotiated the gauntlet of increasingly aggressive panhandlers, the drug dealers he was pretty sure had something inside their jackets other than packs of Newports or Salems, and people with nothing better to do at 8 a.m. than positioned themselves around the entrance of the elevated train station and watch the rush hour parade. And he repeated the process on the way home in the evening when, after a full day of drinking and the cover of night, the street people seemed a little more lively and anxious to make something happen or at least see something happen.
But in dealing with all of that, every day, with a constant backdrop of raised voices and sirens, Morgan had never been shot or directly shot at, until now, on this elevated train platform on a Saturday night when both of those realities came together in a sudden crash of confusion, shock and pain.
The pain. It came in waves from the new hole in his thigh, suddenly growing in intensity and then, just as suddenly, dropping notch or two. Each time the pain rose, Morgan lifted his head and grimaced, staring up at the disorienting orange vapor lights that lit the train platform. He would tighten every muscle in his body in a vain attempt to push the pain back down.
Still, on a scale of one to ten, he gave his pain an eight…no, a nine. He had never felt worse, of course, not even when he was 11 and had gotten a safety pin stuck deep into his balls after he had tried to fix his broken zipper so that he could play street football. But now he sensed there was a little wiggle room between where the pain currently topped out and what he thought he couldn’t bear any more.
It surprised him. A cylinder of metal traveling between 370 and 420 miles per hours (he would later search Wikipedia on his phone while waiting in the emergency room) had easily worked its way past denim, burned through his skin as if it were paper, cleaved through thick muscle (He’d been working out, we’ll call it thick muscle.) and, finally, stopped when it struck bone, cracking it like a plate dropped on a linoleum floor. So, yes, it fucking hurt like fucking hell shit goddamit fuck. And yet…
Morgan known guys who had been stabbed like Grief the Biker, who got sliced in the gut when he decided to act as an unpaid bouncer at O’Lannigan’s and got into a scuffle with guy who refused to pay (He had to be persuaded to put down his beer and seek treatment at the hospital). And he had known plenty of guys who had gotten their ass kicked, some who truly deserved it. And while he hadn’t actually been shot (well, before tonight), Morgan had been shot at. The bullet wasn’t intended for him. He had the misfortune of walking home one evening about 10 feet behind someone that someone else apparently wanted dead. A shadow moving from the alley suddenly became a guy with a gun pointed in their direction. Innocent bystanders usually get the worst of it in those situations, so even before he heard the bullets crack from the barrel, Morgan was diving toward the curb, under a parked car and then low-running toward a house and around the corner.
He’d also had a gun shoved in his face while walking home from the reggae bar in his old neighborhood. He had just crossed Belmont Avenue when a figure in a Bulls jacket and cap stepped out of a doorway and positioned a gun less than 10 inches from his head. The gun was held sideways (it was the early ‘90s - it was a thing then).
“Give it up, bitch!” The order was given with an obvious attempt at sounding as menacing as possible, injected with more bass and enunciation than would be used in normal conversation.
“Give what up, bro?” Morgan answered, swaying a bit wondering why someone was pointing length of plumbing pipe at his head. In addition to six or seven Red Stripes, he had smoked a really good joint with the fake rasta who emceed the shows at the bar.
“Money, motherfucker, what the fuck you think?” The figure moved the gun an inch or two close to Morgan’s forehead.
“Aw, sorry, man, spent all my money at the bar. Catch me next time, okay?” Morgan stumbled away while the would-be robber cursed himself for wasting time with a drunk motherfucker.
As he lay there on the el platform, Morgan used as much dexterity as he could muster to fish his hand into his left pants pocket, work it through the spreading patch of blood that now saturated his jeans, moved his fingers past $7.35 in bills and change until he touched the edge of his cell phone. He pulled it out and found the screen smeared with sticky scarlet liquid. He tried to wipe it clean on his pant leg, then grunted in pain just after absentmindedly raking it over the bullet wound. It took at least a minute before the pain subsided and he was able to tap three numbers on the screen. Someone picked up on the other end and he tried to remain calm but still convey a sense of urgency.
“Yeah, hello? Are you 911? I mean, is this 911? Fuck, I mean, I NEED 911… I mean, an ambulance, I need an ambulance… Yeah, I think I was shot. Well, no, I don’t THINK I was, I’m pretty sure I was. … What?...I’m at Bryn Mawr…BRYN MAWR!...The train station…no, upstairs.”
Morgan was having difficulty understanding how much more information the operator needed. He had told her the “what” (shot in the thigh, or, more specifically, the “fucking thigh,” as he had explicitly explained). He had told her the “who” he was and the “where” he had been shot. But he had stumbled hard on the “how.” What the fuck had actually happened anyway?
“So how long?” he asked the operator.
The voice on the other end of the cell phone said that they were sending an ambulance, so it should be there shortly.
“Well, hurry!”, he said.
The operator began explaining to Morgan the concept of an ambulance, the whole flashing lights, the siren, the general speed and the requirement that cars clear a path for them thing. “Just hurry up, alright?” He ended the call and was suddenly afraid his curt behavior would cause them to stop for a few red lights along the way.
Morgan lay flat on the floor train platform and waited for the sound of sirens once again, this time for him. He tried to distract his mind from the hole in his thigh and the ever-widening patch of blood by looking at the array of illuminated apartment windows that spread out around him and listening to the sounds of a Chicago Saturday night on the street below. Car horns blared as a greeting to some and a warning to get the fuck out of the street to others. Voices were raised to be heard above the horns and offered the same mix of greetings and warnings (“Man, gimmie my fucking money, I’m done playing with you!”). In between the two, acting as a mediator, was music, booming from car speakers and erupting from the pizza joint next to the train station entrance every time the door opened and someone went in or left out with a slice of their less-than-mediocre pie. The music was mostly pissed-off rap and undecipherable salsa and not that he hated those genres, but, you know, not right now. Not with a bullet in his leg.
As he lay stretched out on the dusty wooden station platform, Morgan was hit with the sudden realization that he was quite possibly lying in decades of filth. Yes, the pain was still surging from his left leg to the rest of his body and there were still some vital unanswered questions (Who shot him? Why had they shot him? The basics.) but the knowledge that he was lying in a vast amount of filth was now taking precedence. In all his years in Chicago, he had seen all types of fluids, solids and physical states in-between dropped, leaked, spewed, dribbled, squirted, splashed, glopped, oozed and smeared on the el train platform in an average week. Dirt and spit and phlem and vomit and spilled whiskey and blood and piss and my God, how much piss has been absorbed into this wood over the decades? El platforms were notorious for serving as impromptu urinals for guys who had neither the time nor the inclination to find suitable facilities. Morgan, himself, could easily recall several occasions where he stood at the far end of an el platform in a minor attempt of discretion, unzipped his jeans and felt the cool of the night against his dick as he emptied that evening’s allotment of beer and shots onto the tracks below. The idea of lying in someone else’s piss and shit (shit and piss usually went hand in hand, so to speak) nudged the pain closer to the level 10.
Morgan heard footsteps. Someone – no, two people – were coming up the stairs to the el platform. There was deep laughter and from the volume and occasional profanities, Morgan guessed alcohol was fueling most of it. He hoped they weren’t the EMS technicians. He heard the footsteps stop momentarily, the laughter continue and then the footsteps began again.
“You fucking crazy, man. Hell, naw.”
“Man, I swear to mutherfucking God, that shit happened.”
“Ain’t no way, ain’t no mutherfucking way.”
“Fuck you man, you better believe that shit. And then the mutherfucker had the nerve to pull out his…”
Morgan lifted his head up and backwards and saw two faces staring down at him as he lay on the dirty platform. This was one of those situations where merely giving a head nod and saying ‘S’up?” would probably be insufficient as a greeting.
“S’up?” said one of the men standing over him, his eyes surveying Morgan as one might study a strange fish that had washed up on the beach.
“S’up,” said Morgan. He grimaced.
A brief pause. “Why you layin’ on the floor?” asked the other, looking first at Morgan, then to his friend and then back to Morgan.
Morgan looked down at his leg. The stain on his pants was noticeable even under the nauseating orange glow, though the rules of the color spectrum made it difficult to tell that it was blood and not, say, grape juice. “I think I got shot,” he said.
The two men looked at each other, then back at Morgan. “No shit,” said the first one.
“Damn, that’s fucked up,” said the other.
“Yeah, a little,” said Morgan. He winced as a new wave of pain began to spread.
“That shit hurt?,” asked the other.
Morgan considered giving a smart-ass reply to what even the person asking should have known was a ridiculous question given the scenario, but he didn’t think getting his ass kicked was a useful follow-up to getting shot. “Yeah, it hurts. A lot actually,” he said while wincing.
“Who shot you?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why they shoot you?”
“Don’t know.
The two men suddenly looked at each other then quickly twisted their heads from side to side, scanning their surroundings on the el platform. They both moved briskly to the enclosure near the stairscase, an area surrounded by wood and impossible to see through.
“What?” said Morgan, twisting his body into a difficult position to see where they had gone and in the process ratcheting up his pain a notch. He grunted.
“No offense, man, but them motherfuckers that shot your ass might still be out there somewhere.” One slapped the other on the shoulder with his hand and motioned for them to go down the stairs. “Let’s take the bus, man,” he said, his voice somewhat subdued in a curious attempt at not offending Morgan with the fact that they, unlike him, had the opportunity to leave this scene and were taking it. As they quickly went down the stairs, one shouted back, “Hey man, you want us to call 911 or some shit like that?”
“No, I already did some shit like that…I mean, I called ‘em already,” said Morgan. ‘I’m good.” He paused. “Well, other than a bullet in my fucking leg.” He laughed and then immediately grunted as the pain level hit 10.
SHOT
Surprisingly, getting shot in the leg didn’t hurt as much as Morgan thought it would. Oh, don’t get him wrong, it hurt like hell. Like fuckshitgoddamitshitmotherfucker-on-a-stick type of hurt. Hurt enough to make him utter vile, sexually explicit remarks about his own mother, of whom he was actually quite fond. Hurt enough for him to smash his arm down in painful fury on the wooden floor of the elevated train platform on which he was now lying and, in the process, break his fairly expensive watch, a gift from a former girlfriend who had thrown it at his head during their final argument but he had someone managed to snag it with one hand out of the air. So, yes, getting shot in the leg hurt like hell. And yet…
Not that Morgan had any previous experience in getting shot. Before this particular Saturday night he hadn’t even known anyone who had actually been shot, despite living in the shooting gallery known as Chicago. With more than 400 murders in a year and who-knows-how-many non-fatal shootings, he calculated through his pain that he, by all rights, should know at least one person who had gotten winged, or at the very least, been on the introductory end of a bullet himself.
Still, in his relatively upward-trending neighborhood (median income $55,000 a year), you could lift your window to catch a summer breeze and not have to wait long to hear the distinct snap of bullets exiting the barrel of a gun somewhere across the horizon. Even from his 11th floor apartment, one of many multi-story human beehives that co-mingled with modest three-stories and single family homes in the neighborhood, he could hear the gunshots while he watched “The X Files” or even “The Sopranos.”
But his daily walks from his apartment to the elevated train station were surprisingly relatively uneventful and merely involved fighting his way past the always busy liquor store (the one with a piece of masking tape stretched across the check-out counter upon which the owner had written. “We do not accept money with blood on it.”). He negotiated the gauntlet of increasingly aggressive panhandlers, the drug dealers he was pretty sure had something inside their jackets other than packs of Newports or Salems, and people with nothing better to do at 8 a.m. than positioned themselves around the entrance of the elevated train station and watch the rush hour parade. And he repeated the process on the way home in the evening when, after a full day of drinking and the cover of night, the street people seemed a little more lively and anxious to make something happen or at least see something happen.
But in dealing with all of that, every day, with a constant backdrop of raised voices and sirens, Morgan had never been shot or directly shot at, until now, on this elevated train platform on a Saturday night when both of those realities came together in a sudden crash of confusion, shock and pain.
The pain. It came in waves from the new hole in his thigh, suddenly growing in intensity and then, just as suddenly, dropping notch or two. Each time the pain rose, Morgan lifted his head and grimaced, staring up at the disorienting orange vapor lights that lit the train platform. He would tighten every muscle in his body in a vain attempt to push the pain back down.
Still, on a scale of one to ten, he gave his pain an eight…no, a nine. He had never felt worse, of course, not even when he was 11 and had gotten a safety pin stuck deep into his balls after he had tried to fix his broken zipper so that he could play street football. But now he sensed there was a little wiggle room between where the pain currently topped out and what he thought he couldn’t bear any more.
It surprised him. A cylinder of metal traveling between 370 and 420 miles per hours (he would later search Wikipedia on his phone while waiting in the emergency room) had easily worked its way past denim, burned through his skin as if it were paper, cleaved through thick muscle (He’d been working out, we’ll call it thick muscle.) and, finally, stopped when it struck bone, cracking it like a plate dropped on a linoleum floor. So, yes, it fucking hurt like fucking hell shit goddamit fuck. And yet…
Morgan known guys who had been stabbed like Grief the Biker, who got sliced in the gut when he decided to act as an unpaid bouncer at O’Lannigan’s and got into a scuffle with guy who refused to pay (He had to be persuaded to put down his beer and seek treatment at the hospital). And he had known plenty of guys who had gotten their ass kicked, some who truly deserved it. And while he hadn’t actually been shot (well, before tonight), Morgan had been shot at. The bullet wasn’t intended for him. He had the misfortune of walking home one evening about 10 feet behind someone that someone else apparently wanted dead. A shadow moving from the alley suddenly became a guy with a gun pointed in their direction. Innocent bystanders usually get the worst of it in those situations, so even before he heard the bullets crack from the barrel, Morgan was diving toward the curb, under a parked car and then low-running toward a house and around the corner.
He’d also had a gun shoved in his face while walking home from the reggae bar in his old neighborhood. He had just crossed Belmont Avenue when a figure in a Bulls jacket and cap stepped out of a doorway and positioned a gun less than 10 inches from his head. The gun was held sideways (it was the early ‘90s - it was a thing then).
“Give it up, bitch!” The order was given with an obvious attempt at sounding as menacing as possible, injected with more bass and enunciation than would be used in normal conversation.
“Give what up, bro?” Morgan answered, swaying a bit wondering why someone was pointing length of plumbing pipe at his head. In addition to six or seven Red Stripes, he had smoked a really good joint with the fake rasta who emceed the shows at the bar.
“Money, motherfucker, what the fuck you think?” The figure moved the gun an inch or two close to Morgan’s forehead.
“Aw, sorry, man, spent all my money at the bar. Catch me next time, okay?” Morgan stumbled away while the would-be robber cursed himself for wasting time with a drunk motherfucker.
As he lay there on the el platform, Morgan used as much dexterity as he could muster to fish his hand into his left pants pocket, work it through the spreading patch of blood that now saturated his jeans, moved his fingers past $7.35 in bills and change until he touched the edge of his cell phone. He pulled it out and found the screen smeared with sticky scarlet liquid. He tried to wipe it clean on his pant leg, then grunted in pain just after absentmindedly raking it over the bullet wound. It took at least a minute before the pain subsided and he was able to tap three numbers on the screen. Someone picked up on the other end and he tried to remain calm but still convey a sense of urgency.
“Yeah, hello? Are you 911? I mean, is this 911? Fuck, I mean, I NEED 911… I mean, an ambulance, I need an ambulance… Yeah, I think I was shot. Well, no, I don’t THINK I was, I’m pretty sure I was. … What?...I’m at Bryn Mawr…BRYN MAWR!...The train station…no, upstairs.”
Morgan was having difficulty understanding how much more information the operator needed. He had told her the “what” (shot in the thigh, or, more specifically, the “fucking thigh,” as he had explicitly explained). He had told her the “who” he was and the “where” he had been shot. But he had stumbled hard on the “how.” What the fuck had actually happened anyway?
“So how long?” he asked the operator.
The voice on the other end of the cell phone said that they were sending an ambulance, so it should be there shortly.
“Well, hurry!”, he said.
The operator began explaining to Morgan the concept of an ambulance, the whole flashing lights, the siren, the general speed and the requirement that cars clear a path for them thing. “Just hurry up, alright?” He ended the call and was suddenly afraid his curt behavior would cause them to stop for a few red lights along the way.
Morgan lay flat on the floor train platform and waited for the sound of sirens once again, this time for him. He tried to distract his mind from the hole in his thigh and the ever-widening patch of blood by looking at the array of illuminated apartment windows that spread out around him and listening to the sounds of a Chicago Saturday night on the street below. Car horns blared as a greeting to some and a warning to get the fuck out of the street to others. Voices were raised to be heard above the horns and offered the same mix of greetings and warnings (“Man, gimmie my fucking money, I’m done playing with you!”). In between the two, acting as a mediator, was music, booming from car speakers and erupting from the pizza joint next to the train station entrance every time the door opened and someone went in or left out with a slice of their less-than-mediocre pie. The music was mostly pissed-off rap and undecipherable salsa and not that he hated those genres, but, you know, not right now. Not with a bullet in his leg.
As he lay stretched out on the dusty wooden station platform, Morgan was hit with the sudden realization that he was quite possibly lying in decades of filth. Yes, the pain was still surging from his left leg to the rest of his body and there were still some vital unanswered questions (Who shot him? Why had they shot him? The basics.) but the knowledge that he was lying in a vast amount of filth was now taking precedence. In all his years in Chicago, he had seen all types of fluids, solids and physical states in-between dropped, leaked, spewed, dribbled, squirted, splashed, glopped, oozed and smeared on the el train platform in an average week. Dirt and spit and phlem and vomit and spilled whiskey and blood and piss and my God, how much piss has been absorbed into this wood over the decades? El platforms were notorious for serving as impromptu urinals for guys who had neither the time nor the inclination to find suitable facilities. Morgan, himself, could easily recall several occasions where he stood at the far end of an el platform in a minor attempt of discretion, unzipped his jeans and felt the cool of the night against his dick as he emptied that evening’s allotment of beer and shots onto the tracks below. The idea of lying in someone else’s piss and shit (shit and piss usually went hand in hand, so to speak) nudged the pain closer to the level 10.
Morgan heard footsteps. Someone – no, two people – were coming up the stairs to the el platform. There was deep laughter and from the volume and occasional profanities, Morgan guessed alcohol was fueling most of it. He hoped they weren’t the EMS technicians. He heard the footsteps stop momentarily, the laughter continue and then the footsteps began again.
“You fucking crazy, man. Hell, naw.”
“Man, I swear to mutherfucking God, that shit happened.”
“Ain’t no way, ain’t no mutherfucking way.”
“Fuck you man, you better believe that shit. And then the mutherfucker had the nerve to pull out his…”
Morgan lifted his head up and backwards and saw two faces staring down at him as he lay on the dirty platform. This was one of those situations where merely giving a head nod and saying ‘S’up?” would probably be insufficient as a greeting.
“S’up?” said one of the men standing over him, his eyes surveying Morgan as one might study a strange fish that had washed up on the beach.
“S’up,” said Morgan. He grimaced.
A brief pause. “Why you layin’ on the floor?” asked the other, looking first at Morgan, then to his friend and then back to Morgan.
Morgan looked down at his leg. The stain on his pants was noticeable even under the nauseating orange glow, though the rules of the color spectrum made it difficult to tell that it was blood and not, say, grape juice. “I think I got shot,” he said.
The two men looked at each other, then back at Morgan. “No shit,” said the first one.
“Damn, that’s fucked up,” said the other.
“Yeah, a little,” said Morgan. He winced as a new wave of pain began to spread.
“That shit hurt?,” asked the other.
Morgan considered giving a smart-ass reply to what even the person asking should have known was a ridiculous question given the scenario, but he didn’t think getting his ass kicked was a useful follow-up to getting shot. “Yeah, it hurts. A lot actually,” he said while wincing.
“Who shot you?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why they shoot you?”
“Don’t know.
The two men suddenly looked at each other then quickly twisted their heads from side to side, scanning their surroundings on the el platform. They both moved briskly to the enclosure near the stairscase, an area surrounded by wood and impossible to see through.
“What?” said Morgan, twisting his body into a difficult position to see where they had gone and in the process ratcheting up his pain a notch. He grunted.
“No offense, man, but them motherfuckers that shot your ass might still be out there somewhere.” One slapped the other on the shoulder with his hand and motioned for them to go down the stairs. “Let’s take the bus, man,” he said, his voice somewhat subdued in a curious attempt at not offending Morgan with the fact that they, unlike him, had the opportunity to leave this scene and were taking it. As they quickly went down the stairs, one shouted back, “Hey man, you want us to call 911 or some shit like that?”
“No, I already did some shit like that…I mean, I called ‘em already,” said Morgan. ‘I’m good.” He paused. “Well, other than a bullet in my fucking leg.” He laughed and then immediately grunted as the pain level hit 10.