Dead Boys (17 page)
Back in the apartment, I sit at the kitchen table and smoke a couple of cigarettes. The people in the next unit are arguing about money, and the guy upstairs flushes the toilet and turns on the shower. It’s something I’m usually able to ignore, the dreary murmur of these other lives at the edges of my own, but not tonight. The kid screams himself awake when I pick him up. I quiet him and wrap him in a blanket. There’s no way to lock the ruined front door, so I just pull it shut and leave it.
I
’S EASIER TO
think out on the bright, straight streets, behind the wheel of the truck. With half of me busy watching for stop signs and keeping to the speed limit, the ringing in my ears fades, and I try to put this latest disappointment into perspective. I let my hopefulness get the better of me again, which is just the kind of lamebrain leap I’m always making. The women at the coffee shop know where Shelly is, and I could get it out of them by saying the kid is sick. I could drive right up to so-and-so’s fancy house and barge right into his party and tell Little Miss Starfucker exactly what I think of her sneakiness, but what good would that do? She’d laugh in my face and call me an asshole. We wouldn’t talk for a few days, until I apologized for embarrassing her in front of her friends, and then we’d be right back where we started. I’ve been running in circles like that for years now, with her just one step ahead of me, and not once did I consider the possibility that I might never catch up. I was always sure she’d wear out before I did.
T
HE KID IS
hysterical again. He struggles to open the door of the truck, and I almost kill us both, veering into oncoming traffic as I try to stop him. I pull into the minimall to calm him down, but he’s tired and cranky and won’t let me touch him. The lights are still on in the doughnut shop, and I tell him that if he’ll be a big boy, he can have Whatever he wants. He allows me to take his hand and lead him inside.
I don’t say anything when he orders more than he can possibly eat, I just have the clerk add on a coffee and pay for it all. We sit across from each other at a little plastic table. When I ask for a bite of one of his maple bars, he shoves it back into the bag and hugs the bag to his chest. Sad music is playing on the radio, and the beginning of a thick fog smears the lights shining down on the empty parking lot. I’m reminded that there’s an ocean nearby, that we’ve come about as far as there is to go in this direction.
T
HE SUN IS
rising when the kid awakens. He sits up next to me on the seat of the truck and sleepily watches the breakers fold into the shore as we zip along beside them, headed north. A guy once told me Oregon was a nice place to raise children. Said the trees there were older than anything we know. It sounded like something to see. Our clothes are in back, a few other things. We don’t need much. Shelly can have the rest.
She should be getting home right about now, drunk probably, a fresh hickey on her neck. The note I left was pretty basic. When it was time to put everything on paper, there wasn’t much to say. Still, I imagine her crying as she reads it. Or maybe she’ll be angry and tear it into little pieces. Not that it matters.
“I’ve got to pee-pee,” the kid says.
I pull off the freeway and swing back under it to a parking lot on the beach.
“Want to wear my sunglasses?” I ask, and the kid smiles at me with his momma’s smile as I set them on his face. We get out, and I unbutton his pants so he can do his business. There are seagulls here, surfers, a few fishermen. I walk to the crumbling edge of the asphalt, pick up a handful of sand, and fling it at the waves. The breeze blows right through me.
A
SHOTGUN BLAST AT DAWN SEPARATES NIGHT AND DAY. I
come awake awash in adrenaline before the echo has faded and roll off the bed to sprawl on the nappy motel shag, where I hope I’ll be safe if war has broken out between the crackheads in the next room and the pimp downstairs. The carpet reeks of cigarette smoke and spilled perfume. I press my face into it and wait for another explosion, but there’s only this dog somewhere, putting together long and short barks into combinations reminiscent of Morse code. I imagine that I’m able to decipher the gruff pronouncements:
He who feeds me is a liar and a thief. His hand upon me is a curse. God sees all and does nothing.
The parking lot is quiet when I finally muster the guts to crawl to the window and peek between the drapes. The other rooms are shut up tight, and a perfect mirror image of the neon vacancy sign shivers in the placid, black water of the swimming pool. So I guess I dreamed the gunshot, or maybe it’s Simone again, my dead wife, trying to drive me crazy.
Linda is still sound asleep, too, but that doesn’t prove anything. A stone speed freak, her standard routine is seventy-two hours up and twenty-four down, and when she crashes, she crashes hard. Right now she looks as serene as an angel or a sweet, dead baby. A blanket hides most of the damage: the tracks; the scabs that keep her nervous fingers busy; the bruised skin stretched thin over her ribs and spine, elbows and knees. She’s sixteen years old and has been raped three times, and I’m like an uncle to her, like a big brother, she says, because I let her stay in my room when it’s cold outside. No, I’m not fucking her. I’d like to, but then Simone would kill me for sure.
I rejoin her on the bed, careful to keep to my side, and watch the walls go from blue to pink to white, until the river of grief twisting through me unexpectedly swells and jumps its banks. At the first rush of tears, I get up and shut myself in the bathroom, and it’s as rough as it’s been in a while, but by the time the liquor stores open, I’m showered and shaved and empty enough to bob like a cork on the surface of another day.
T
HE LISTLESS WINTER
sun doesn’t do much to warm the chinky concrete of the pool deck, where I sit sipping beer and tomato juice, my feet dangling in the frigid water. The pool is the heart of this place. From here I can keep an eye on all of the doors and windows. I can see everything coming at me. I work on a letter I’ve been meaning to write.
Dear Simone, please leave me alone.
Relaxing my neck by degrees, I let my head fall back until I’m staring up at the sky, which is crawling with choppers and blimps and spectral silver jets. The wind steals half of every cigarette I light.
The bad guys sleep at this time of day, so the kids who live here are running wild, making the most of the few hours when it’s safe for them to be out of their rooms. While their mothers cluster around the Coke machine, as vigilant as nursing cats, they play hide-and-seek among the cars in the parking lot and pedal tricycles in sloppy circles. I ignore them as best I can. They make me nervous. I’m afraid that at any moment they’ll go off like a string of firecrackers and disintegrate into acrid smoke and drifts of shredded newspaper.
A couple of them, little boys, rattle the gate of the fence that surrounds the pool and beg in Spanish to be let in.
“Vamoose,” I say. “Adios.”
Undaunted, they snake their skinny arms through the bars and strain to reach the lock. I scoop some ice from my cup and fling it at them, and they fall back laughing as a police car eases into the lot, no lights or sirens. Before it has come to a stop, the boys’ mother is herding them back to the family’s room, and the other mothers, too, gather their children. Within seconds the parking lot is empty. The sudden silence makes my palms itch. Mrs. Cho, the owner of the motel, leads the cops up the stairs, and I lift my feet out of the pool and stomp some feeling into them in case things get ugly and I have to run for cover.
When the eviction party reaches the second floor, it’s round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. Room 210: old guy, Mexican, Cuban, something. Wears a cowboy hat and plays the radio loud late at night to drown out the whores’ comings and goings. The kids and their mothers watch from behind half-closed doors as one of the officers knocks with his baton. His partner cups his eyes to peer in the window, but the glass has been covered over with tinfoil. Mrs. Cho dials her cell, and the phone in the room rings and rings and rings. After a bit of discussion, she unlocks the door with her passkey and moves off down the walkway so the cops can do their stuff.
“Police!” they shout in unison as the door swings open. Guns drawn, they roll into the room, one high, one low. Such caution is unnecessary, however — the guy has been dead for a while, judging by the stench that billows out and settles over the motel like another coat of stucco. Mrs. Cho backs away, covering her nose and mouth. She bumps into the railing and slides along it toward the steps. Then the cops reappear on the walkway. One of them says something snide to the other and both laugh, but they’re not happy, and neither am I. I’ll be smelling death for days.
Are you happy now? I promise I’ll take the blame for what happened to you if you’ll just let me be.
M
Y SHADOW LIES
beside me, a wan and shapeless stain in the gutter. I drag it into the liquor store, to the beer cooler, the register, and out again. The effort leaves me winded. Twisting the cap off my forty, I drop onto a bus bench, but I’m barely settled when a passing car’s backfire sends my heart wheeling with the pigeons from the telephone wire overhead.
Eightball rolls up on his bicycle with Linda perched on the handlebars. Eightball, because that’s how black he is. He doesn’t care for the name, but so what, the little dope fiend, the little thief. I don’t care for how he professes to love Linda one minute and pimps her the next. She’s welcome in my room, but he is not allowed.
“S’up,” he says. He feigns interest in a billboard across the street, a giant hot dog adorned with a bolt of yellow mustard. He can’t look me in the eye.
Linda slides off the handlebars and sits beside me on the bench, then immediately pops up again like something has stung her. She stands on one foot, using the other to scratch the back of her leg. She’s tweaking, every hair of her platinum crewcut in frenzied motion, her nostrils rimed with dried snot.
“Fuckin’ that dude killed himself,” she blurts through clenched teeth. “We saw’m carryin’m out. Smelled like fuckin’ I don’t know. Like shit. You see it? Hung himself in the closet. C’n I have a hit of your beer?”
I give her one, and she tries to sit again, but is soon back on her feet, rocking from side to side like a metronome marking loony time.
“They took’m away in an ambulance. What they do with guys like him, with no family and shit, is they take’m to the hospital and give’m to the students there. They’re learnin’ to be doctors, and it’s a law they c’n do experiments and shit on your body if you’re poor. That’s why I made a will and left it with my mom. If I die, they got to burn me and spread my ashes over Hawaii.”
A car sidles up to the curb, driven by a kid with a mustache that looks glued on. He rolls down the passenger window and calls out to Linda, “You for sale?”
“Yeah, she for sale, she for sale,” Eightball says. He pedals to the window and practically climbs inside. “How much you got?”
The kid speeds away in a panic, tires squealing, and Eightball’s lucky his head doesn’t go with him.
“You fucker,” Linda wails. “I can’t believe you.”
“What you mean? I’s just joking.”
Eightball drops the bike and hurries to put his arms around her. She hugs him back. Don’t ask me why people do what they do. After Simone jumped off the freeway overpass, taking our baby girl with her, the cops brought me to the station and wondered aloud what drove her to it. I was her husband, they reasoned, I should know. I didn’t, and I still don’t, and I think that’s what pissed her off.
“We gettin’ married,” Eightball says over Linda’s shoulder. He grabs her wrist and forces her hand my way. I glimpse a ring. Linda’s face ripples like the motel pool in a downpour, translucent and impenetrable all at once.
“My mom signed the paper,” she says.
“And my daddy comin’ to sign mine tomorrow,” Eightball boasts.
“You can drive us to the place, can’t you?” Linda asks. “If I give you gas money?”
“Sure,” I say.
“First thing tomorrow morning.”
“Whenever.”
I won’t hold my breath. We’ve been through this before.
Eightball slides his hand under Linda’s thin white T-shirt, up under the black bra showing through it. He squeezes her tit and stares at me like,
What the fuck are you going to do?
This kid. This fucking kid. I pretend to doze off and picture him dead in the street.
“He all fucked up,” Eightball snorts.
Linda climbs back onto the handlebars, and the two of them wobble their way down Van Nuys Boulevard. When they’re good and gone, I open my eyes. Traffic whips past. There’s a loose manhole in the street that bucks and clatters whenever a car passes over it, and it’s bucking and clattering like crazy right now, as if to remind me that it’s Tuesday, three p.m., and everybody has someplace to be except me.
Stop it
, I say to Simone.
Please
.
I wish she’d just get it over with. Hiding in palm trees and broken-down taco trucks and stray cats, she haunts this whole city, lashing out at me, dismantling my life piece by piece. My job, the house — I can’t even keep a decent pair of shoes. Two days after I buy any, they’re gone. They disappear right out of the closet. She wants me to suffer, and I have obliged, but the price of peace remains a mystery. I’ve offered to take the blame for her death and for the death of our child, but that’s not enough. I’m beginning to think she wants me to die, too.
T
HE BAR STILL
reeks of Pine-Sol or Whatever they swab it out with before opening. The TV’s off, and Cecil is the only other customer, at the far end, intent on the newspaper crossword puzzle.
“The hell’s Jimmy?” I ask.
“In the can.”
I slip behind the bar and draw myself a Bud.
“What a ruckus at your place today,” Cecil murmurs.
“Somebody said suicide.”