stick him
by Tom Andes
When they were kids, they’d beaten up the guys cruising for sex in the bushes at the windmills in Golden Gate Park. Patrick had known that it was wrong. But he was sixteen, seventeen, tipping the scales at 270, so the other kids called him a pillow-humping loser, and you knew he’d never had a date in his life, never kissed a girl because who would want to make out with a fat freak like Patrick?
Yeah, it was just like Declan Heaney said: Patrick couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse.
That September night they’d rousted the guy from the clearing by the dunes near the beach, maybe half a dozen heads from the Sunset District, good Irish Catholic boys, and just one of him, a poor slob from the Castro District, a guy with a denim jacket and a handlebar mustache who’d likely moved here from Illinois, coming to tolerant, liberal San Francisco to escape shit like this.
Funny part was that most of those boys had grown up to be respectable members of the community, and here was Patrick, the one who’d had a conscience, and he was still living at his ma’s like the loser he was.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” That same night, in the clearing, Declan had run his fingers down Patrick’s face, which was wet with tears.
And Patrick had shaken his head.
This would be their little secret.
++
Now, Declan Heaney’s face was on a campaign poster for city council on a telephone pole down the street from Patrick’s ma’s place on 34th and Lawton, and who would’ve thought after all these years that Declan Heaney would’ve ended up running for office, even if it was of what they called the last white trash neighborhood in San Francisco?
Tears blurring his eyes, Patrick tore the poster down, then looked over both shoulders, like one of the Heaney boys or their fifty cousins might see him and open up a can of whoop-ass.
++
He’d hit the guy, just like Declan had told him to. But Patrick had to take responsibility for his actions, and it had haunted him for years, so that he still cried and felt ashamed, like he did about the other thing.
“You see those rainbow flags flying downtown,” Declan used to say, “that tells you who’s really running this city.”
As if there were a big gay conspiracy to control San Francisco, Declan talking the same way about the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, and the Jews.
Now, a rainbow flag was hanging in front of the café Declan had opened near the end of Taraval, there to make all the transplants and the yuppies who were his customers feel safe.
++
Patrick walked in the door, still holding the crumpled poster. It was one of those rare, sunny days when the fog had burned off by early afternoon, the sky a perfect crystalline blue, temperatures in the low 70s. He’d never taken that weight off—he tipped the scales at closer to 320 now—so he was drenched in sweat, greasy red hair hanging in his eyes, a sore spot on his rump from carrying that rusty butterfly knife Declan had given him all those years ago.
“Stick him,” Declan had said, “or you’re a sissy, too.”
Channeling all his hatred and self-loathing, all his rage at the number of times the Heaney boys and their minions had whaled on him, Patrick had. He’d stabbed the poor dude because Declan Heaney had told him to.
Lucky for both of them that knife was dull, ripping the guy’s jacket before he broke free and took off through the park, half those kids giving chase, the other half pissing themselves laughing.
Patrick had run after the guy, his lungs burning. “Stay out of our neighborhood.”
It was maybe the one time in his life he felt like he belonged.
When he came back to the clearing, Declan was standing by the trees on the Sunset District side of the park, the lone streetlight down the Great Highway casting his face in shadow.
++
Couldn’t say the dude hadn’t aged well, with his flight coat and his paddy hat, still with a whiff of the street and his short-lived Golden Gloves career hanging about him like a mantle. He’d been the neighborhood’s Great White Hope, fighting guys named Perez and Ramirez in showcases at the Irish Cultural Center. Now he was heading towards senescence, that long twilight of midday coffee, bocci ball, and chess games, holding a plate of the Tuesday meatloaf special and looking around the café because Patrick had asked for him at the register.
“You did good.” That night in the park, Declan had touched Patrick’s face. Should’ve known better, but Patrick let himself be comforted, leaning his cheek into the older boy’s hand, Declan holding his jaw, his shoulder, the black shapes of the windmills silhouetted against the sky as he forced Patrick to his knees.
++
“Patrick?” Declan blinked at him, bewildered, but wary, too. “You looking for work?”
They all knew, didn’t they, how it had ended for Patrick, living with his ma and never holding a job longer than the few months they took on extra people over the holiday at Macy’s.
Maybe they all knew, too, what Declan had done that night in the park. Patrick couldn’t be the only one, could he?
Patrick held the crumpled poster with one hand while with the other, he reached in his pocket.
All those years, he’d been sharpening that knife, putting a fine edge on it.
++
Declan dropped the plate, the ceramic shattering, gravy splattering his Ben Shermans, every eye in the room, all his constituents turning. “I’ve got kids, a family.”
Under the blade, a vein in the guy’s neck jumped. Patrick was going to expiate that sin, to cut it out of both of them, but not with the knife. “Tell them the truth about what we did.”
Photo of Tom Andes
BIO: Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a musician and freelance editor. Southern Crescent Recording Co. re-released his acclaimed EPs on vinyl under the title The Ones That Brought You Home in 2025. He can be found at tomandes.com.