Old Click Richards

Old Click Richards takes a long, slow drag of his cigarette, breathes the smoke out of his tired, battered lungs and coughs suddenly. I don’t ask him if he’s okay. It seems pretty clear to me what the answer would be.

His hand reaches out and grasps my shoulder as he leans forward in his chair. He coughs hard, violently, and I think I can hear something wet spattering onto the wooden floorboards of the deck.

At last he sits back, wiping his filthy mouth with the back of his hand. He is thirty-four years old, this man, but I can never think of him as any younger than sixty.

“Days’re gettin’ colder,” says he, and his voice is a deep, resonant bass. It is a voice you fall into; the voice that reported with clear concise precision the hustle and bustle of the outside world whenever there was hustle and bustle to report. It is the voice this small town of Hickertonfield turned to at the end of the day, when their work was done and there was nothing left but to turn on the radio and turn off their kids’ cartoons on the TV.

“They are at that,” I say in response to his statement. From the corner of my vision I can see that he’s turned to look at me. We’re silent for a moment, before I ask, “What are you going to do about Emo?”

“Hell if I know, brother,” says Click Richards. It’s at that moment that Emo the Emu comes toward us, head bobbing, his long bird legs not so much sweeping over the ground as gliding. I’m not sure what to make of Click’s sudden and mysterious acquisition of an authentic Australian emu—one of the many mysteries that lurk behind the voice of Hickertonfield’s longest-running radio news reporter, no doubt. All I know is Click didn’t have an emu when he left town two years ago, but when he came back in the spring of this year he seemed to have acquired one, pacing madly in his pickup.

“Guess I can’t keep him indoors,” says Click. “Place is too small, and the bastard’ll knock over every damn thing he’ll see. Can’t keep him outside, he’ll freeze.”

He starts quietly chugging his beer. When it’s all drained, he tosses the empty bottle as hard and as far as he can, out beyond the boundaries of his property, comprised of a picket fence in painful need of repainting, and grass in painful need of some heavy-duty hacking and slashing.

“Could give him to Clara,” I say before I can stop myself.

Something changes in the air and I know I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the ex. Click spits something foul and says, “I ain’t giving nothing to her and that’s final. Especially not Emo.”

Emo the Emu is looking at us quizzically, his big dark eyes glinting in whatever moonlight’s filtering through the black clouds above us.

I turn to the man beside me. Click’s deep in thought now, it looks like. You can tell by the way he’s tucking his hair behind his ear, the way his eyes are squinting at Emo, who’s staring right back.

“Looks like he wants food,” I say.

“Well he’s just been fed,” snaps Click. “Bastard always wants more food. Eats more than Clara and the kids ever did.” He coughs again, sounding like a vacuum cleaner getting caught on something big and grey and mean.

Something occurs to me, and I voice it immediately. “A zoo!”

Click waits for me to continue, so I do. “Way I see it, Click, you’ve got yourself an authentical Strange and Outlandish creature on your hands what needs taking care of. Now I’m dead certain there’s zoos around someplace where folks’d be more’n happy to take ol’ Emo off your hands. Probably pay you a good-sized amount for him too.”

Click’s shaking his head. “No, no zoos.”

“Why not?”

“You know how they treat those animals in there? They treat ’em like shit. At least with me, he ain’t gonna be treated like some caged bird. Hell,” he says, lighting another cigarette, “only reason I’m deciding what to do with him is so he doesn’t suffer during winter. I send him someplace where he’ll suffer anyway, what good would any of it do?”

I frown. “You think of something better?”

“I damn well have,” says Click. “Thought of it when you were mentioning that bitch woman’s name.”

He falls silent. Emo looks back up at him, and for about a minute I watch some kind of silent parley between them.

When Emo drops his head to peck at the ground again, Click turns back to me. There’s something in his eyes now, something I haven’t seen since the day Clara Richards took the two kids and left for good.

“Ernie…” he says, and he’s struggling to say my name.

“Yeah, Click,” I say.

“Ernie, inside my house is my shotgun.”

We’re quiet, except for the occasional chirp from Emo. Click doesn’t have to say anything more, really.

I don’t ask him if he’s sure. It seems pretty clear to me what the answer would be.

“Could…” he begins to say, but I’m already standing up and putting a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It’s in the broom closet,” he calls after me as I enter his home.

It doesn’t take me very long to find it. There isn’t much to the house of Hickertonfield’s longest-running radio news reporter. Sift through the bags of empty potato chips and empty microwave dinner dishes and you’ll have covered the whole place.

I emerge not three minutes later. In my hands is the big weapon I remember Click buying for the protection of his family, years and years ago.

I put it in his hands. He doesn’t really look at it, just sits there in his chair, fingers running over the cold metal.

Click exhales, slowly and carefully. His face is lit up by the lights inside. It looks like it did when the radio station fired him, Click Richards, the man who the town and every other town in the valley would tune into at the end of their days.

He taps his foot against the wooden floorboards, twice. Emo the Emu looks up quickly at his master, and steps up towards him.

“You’d best get on home now, Ernie,” says Click. “I don’t want you watching.”

As I get up and begin walking down the steps to his front yard, towards the entrance and away from him, I hear his deep voice call out.

“You understand,” he’s saying, “I just… I don’t want him to suffer. I don’t want him to die slow.” He coughs, hard, and again something wet spatters to the floor.

“Ain’t my place to decide, Click,” I say.