American Outlaw (6 page)

I opened up my front door and let myself into my house. The house was quiet, as usual. I dropped my bag and went into the kitchen, where I opened up the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of juice.

“Mind if I have some?”

I jumped, startled.

“Who are you?”

A girl extended her hand to me. “My name’s Tracy.” She was about nineteen or twenty, and pretty. She was slim with a fair complexion.

“Oh,” I said, not sure of what to say next. “I’m . . . um . . . Jesse.”

“Hi,
Jesse.
” She smiled widely. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

“Did you . . . did you want some juice?” I asked.

“I’d love some.”

Carefully, I opened up a kitchen cabinet and searched for a clean glass for her. My dad had all kinds of vintage glassware, but like I
said, we weren’t the best housekeepers, so it took a moment. Finally I found a passable tumbler. I reached into the freezer, unstuck a few cubes of ice, and plopped them in the glass. Then I poured some from-concentrate orange juice into the glass and handed it to the strange girl who was in my kitchen.

“Thank you,” she said pleasantly. She sipped from the glass and smiled at me again. “Yum.”

I shifted uneasily. “Uh . . .”

“Yes?”

“Who are you?”

“I told you. I’m
Tracy.
” She giggled. “I’m a friend of your dad’s.” She spooled some of her pretty hair around her fingers and played with it coquettishly.

“Is he home?” I asked.

“Nope.” She giggled again. “
You
are, though.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I just stared at my feet. Tracy sipped at her juice, looking at the framed posters my dad had put up on the walls as she walked around my kitchen. Then, decisively, she strode toward the living room. I followed. She plopped down on our couch and motioned to me.

“Come sit down, Jesse.”

I did what she said.

“So, how old are you?” Tracy asked. She appeared to be poring over me in a way I couldn’t quite interpret.

“Fifteen.”

“Wow.” She laughed. “You look
way
older than that.” She reached over and stroked my arm gently. “You’re pretty strong, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said softly. I didn’t know where to look.

“Do you have a girlfriend or anything?”

“No,” I mumbled. “I’m too busy . . . football.”

“Oh, that’s
crazy.
A boy as cute as you should have a girlfriend. I mean, that’s really crazy.”

“Well,” I said, awkwardly. “Thanks.”

“Jesse?” she said. “I just had an awesome idea. Do you want a massage?”

“Uh . . .”

“It’ll feel great, I
promise
! I’m super good at massage.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Come here.” She reached for my shoulders and started to rub them very gently. I was still sitting bolt upright.

“How does that feel?” she asked.

“Nice.”

“You could give me a massage next, if you want.” She giggled. “I bet you’re really good at it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I
really
like your body,” the girl whispered. I could feel her hot breath on my neck. Her hands strayed from my shoulders. They grazed my sides and came to rest on my thighs.

I didn’t say anything. My whole body tensed.

“What do you think of my body?” she whispered. “Do you want to see more of it?” Her lips came so close to my ear that I could feel how wet they were. “Do you want to see me . . . naked?”

Abruptly, I stood up. “I gotta go.”

Tracy looked at me, startled.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m sorry. I just—I really, really gotta go.” I raced up the stairs to my bedroom and slammed the door behind me.

A couple of minutes later, I heard the front door open, then close. Tracy, who I guessed was a teenaged hooker my dad had hired to deflower me, had left the building.

——

“I would give my left
nut
for that girl,” Bobby moaned.

“You’d give your nut for any girl,” I said.

“Yeah. But I’d give my
left
for Rhonda Clark, and my left is my
special
nut.” He stared at me. “It’s the low hanger.”

Rhonda Clark was tan and dark. She was so gorgeous that everyone always seemed to be staring at her. But she wasn’t the kind of girl who went out of her way to talk to everybody.

“Bobby, just to let you know,” I said, “you might have some competition there.”

“You got your eye on Rhonda?”

“She’s amazing,” I admitted.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Bobby snorted. “Well, good
luck,
is all I can say, James. I mean, come on, man—that girl is
far
too fine for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Frankly, a girl like Rhonda would be a lot more comfortable on the arm of someone with a touch of
class.
” Bobby looked at me pityingly. “Which would be me, naturally.”

I patted Bobby gently on the back. “Let’s not fight over someone who probably doesn’t even know either of us exist.”

“Get your hand off of me,” Bobby said. “Whoa. Don’t seduce me, James, you sick freak.”

I never expected even to talk to her. So I couldn’t even believe it when Rhonda started looking back at me when I shyly stared at her in the halls. She smiled right at me.

“Hey, come over here,” she commanded one afternoon.

“Who, me?”

She giggled. “Yes,
you.
” Rhonda crossed her arms over the books she was carrying. “You keep
looking
at me. What’s your name?”

“I’m . . . uh . . . Jesse,” I said, finally.

“Don’t you play football or something?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“I heard you were pretty good,” she said.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“No, I heard you were
really
good.” Rhonda smiled. “Is there anything else you’re good at?”

I thought for a second. “Swap meets?”

She looked unimpressed, and I hated myself for being so lame. I racked my mind to think what was
cool
about me: What could I boast about to impress this pretty girl who, against all odds, was talking to me in the La Sierra hallway?

“Well, I know a little bit about cars,” I said, finally.

“Oh my God!” Rhonda squealed. “You know how to
fix
cars?”

“Sure,” I said, delighted I’d stumbled on to something that this girl actually cared about. “I mean, it depends. But I can fix a lot of stuff.”

“My mom’s Chevy has been broken for
three
weeks!” She shifted the books in her arms, displaying casually a little bit of her rockin’ bod. “I don’t suppose you would want to take a look at it for me?”

“Shit,” I said, “I’d love to. I mean . . . sorry. I didn’t mean to say—”

“What?” Rhonda giggled. “Look, Jesse, if you fix my mom’s car, then you can say ‘shit’ all day and all night.”

“That’s not what I want,” I said.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked at her. “If I fix your mom’s car, then I want you to go out to the movies with me.”

“Oh really? What movie?”

“I . . . really don’t care,” I said honestly. The whole school throbbed and moved around us in the halls. I ignored everyone. It was just me and her, locked in a gaze. And it felt like the best thing ever.

She stared at me for a really long time, then finally broke out into the most gorgeous smile I’d ever seen. “Yeah,” she said. “That sounds good.”

Please note: I fixed the living
shit
out of that car.

——

Soon Rhonda and I were an item. Her perfect teenaged scent pervaded every aspect of my being. It was all roses and hair spray and cheerleader pom-poms and white cotton panties twisted up in a ball on the floor of my car.

Not to be outdone, my father embarked upon a romance of his own. Nina was a cocktail waitress at a bar in Long Beach. She boasted stringy hair that hung down from her forehead, moplike.

“
So
pleased ta meet you,” she sneered, the first time she came over to the house. The way Nina talked, it was like there was an invisible cigarette hanging from her bottom lip. I could almost see the butt moving up and down.

My dad was never one to beat around the bush, so before long, they’d gotten hitched, and I had a new stepmom. One day, she arrived at my house smacking gum like it was her job, her skinny, weather-beaten hands on her hips, and a household of possessions thrown haphazardly into a dented Ryder truck behind her. Two kids stood by her side, staring at me hostilely.

“Jesse,” came my dad’s voice, “unload the truck for Nina.”

I knew this action would officially end my time alone with my dad, and the realization put me momentarily beyond words. Had anybody thought to ask me if three new people could move into my house? Would they really be allowed to invade the first taste of happiness that I’d been trying to cultivate for my whole life?

“Well?” Nina said. She jerked her chin. “You gonna do what your dad said?”

With no other choice, I put my head down and walked slowly toward the truck.

“Don’t
break
anything,” Nina snapped.

Nina was a better homemaker than Joanna: she could actually cook a little bit. But she was not what you would call a stellar conversationalist.

“Hey,” I said. “I think your kids stole some money out of my desk.”

No response.

“Excuse me,” I repeated. “Did you hear what I said? I had ten bucks in my desk. Now it’s gone, and I think one of your kids
stole
it.”

Nina looked at me, as if just discovering I was there. “My kids don’t steal,” she grunted, moving hair out of her face. She stirred the soup she was making for dinner, sucked on the oversized spoon. “Weren’t raised that way.”

“Yeah, well, look, I hate to tell you,” I said, my voice rising, “some money is gone, and I sure as hell didn’t spend it. My dad didn’t take it, and I guess that leaves you and your kids.” I folded my arms and stared her down. “So what are we gonna do about it?”

Nina stirred, her concentration intense. She peered into the oven, attending to her casserole. The contents of the Pyrex captivated her attention entirely.

“Hey!” I said. “Hello?”

Nina looked back up at me and squinted, as if meeting me for the first time. “I
told
you, my family don’t steal shit.” Her jaw worked up and down.

Defeated, I stomped out of the kitchen. The next day, I visited a hardware store and bought a dead bolt for my room. Without it, I was convinced my stepbrother and stepsister would take everything that wasn’t nailed down. I thought this, because that’s what I would have done. They didn’t want to live with me any more than I wanted to live with them. Yet now that they were here, they would do their best to exploit the situation.

We coexisted uneasily for several months. Nina and I grew no closer. However, I grew to tolerate my stepsister and stepbrother, and then to like them. The unshakable force of the dead bolt imposed a kind of boundary, and they learned to act right. We were pillars of decency in an otherwise shitty adult world: one riddled with deception, neglect, and high-sodium food products. Incredibly, despite the chaos that it grew out of, our friendship exists to this day.

Maybe it would have been an okay family to ride out my high school years with. Nina could never have been a mom to me, but on the plus side, I probably wasn’t going to happen upon a box of nudie pictures of her. No magazine in the world would publish one of those.

But it all turned out to be moot, when the house burned down.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was down the street at a neighbor’s house, drinking beer with Bobby.

Bobby was getting a pretty good buzz on. He could always drink, and when he was in the company of a woman, as he was now, with my neighbor Kelly, he tipped them back at double speed.

“We’re about to be the kings of the school,” he babbled. “State champs, probably, and then of course, the NFL is my personal plan . . .”

Suddenly I smelled something.

“What
is
that?”

“What are you babbling about, Jesse?”

“Yeah,” Kelly said, giggling. “Are you getting
weird,
Jesse?”

“Jesse’s always weird,” Bobby announced. “Ain’t you,” he said, slurping.

“Yeah,” I said quietly, helping myself to another drink. It wasn’t exactly my style to drink in the middle of the afternoon, but hell, it was Sunday. My dad and Nina and her kids were up in the Bay Area, attending one of his auctions; I had the town all to myself. Something felt pretty good about the way these cold, watery beers were going down, too. “I just thought something smelled off.”

“Pardon him, please, he’s retarded,” Bobby apologized for me. He tried to slip an arm around Kelly’s shoulders. She slipped out from underneath his grasp, giggling. “I’ll be happy to ask him to leave, if you like.”

We continued partying, working on a collective buzz, listening to music.

“You guys like Bon Jovi?” Kelly asked. “Their lead singer is such a
doll.
”

Bobby laughed. “I dig their bass player.” He screwed up his face, then belched violently. “Giant teenage crush.”

I laughed, not really listening. “Seriously, you guys don’t smell that?”

“I don’t know what you’re
talking
about,” Bobby said.

“Hold on,” Kelly said, seriously. “I smell something, too. Doesn’t it smell like something’s—”

“Burning,” I finished for her, my insides flushing with ice water, and we jumped to our feet and ran out the door.

Outside, half a block down, my house was ablaze.

As I watched, shocked, the house started igniting seemingly of its own accord. Loud, crazy explosions rocked the frame.

“What is
that
?” Bobby asked, awed for maybe the first time in his life.

“It’s my fireworks,” I said. A sinking, helpless feeling was building in the pit of my stomach.

I’d been storing fireworks—black powder, bottle rockets, and bricks of M-15s—in the garage for years, for so long I’d forgotten they were even there. In terrible bursts, they began exploding violently. I had ammo in there, too, bullets and shells. It sounded like a war. Flames began to lick at the windows, at the walls, at the roof.