Killing Time in Crystal City (10 page)

“I prefer, ‘emotionally subnormal.'”

“Shut
up.
No, I am not all sorted out. I know that. But yes, I do feel saved, and I do get something from the communion of souls, and the beautiful and positive and healing messages of the church, and the forgiveness that is always there if I have honest sorrow for the things I've done. And if my church, my community, my belief system does that for me, why should the likes of
you
think you have a better idea when it is so obvious you don't have any idea at all? Mockery and criticism of everybody else is a shit religion, Kiki.”

God. And I mean that sincerely.

I blink forty times before speaking, just to get some moisture back in my eyes after Molly's sandblasting.

“I was out of line,” I say quietly. “I really am sorry. Forgive me?”

Now she snatches the clothes away from me. “Of course I forgive you. That's what we do,” she says, with the old smile and bright big eyes back in place. “But now I have to go to confession for all that scolding I just did. Thanks, jerk.”

“Sorry. Hey, that sorry thing gets easier the more you do it.”

“But you have to mean it or it doesn't . . . Wow, you folded these. And”—she sniffs—“fabric softener.”

“See,” I say, “how's that for a real man. Pretty butch, or what?”

She spins back in the direction of my room. “I don't know if I'd call it butch, but it's not half bad, either. Still, you could learn a lot about expressing yourself from your father.” She slams the door on that one.

Oh, yes, back where we started, the poetry. Why do all roads lead back to that man?

“Okay, I have to go,” Molly says, sweeping back into view, sniffing the sleeve of her freshly laundered blouse as she does. Her hair, after the shower and good long sleep, looks precisely as it did before, and precisely as it has every time I've seen her. Browns-helmet perfect, Browns-helmet tough.

Even her hair is resilient.

“How come you have to go?” I ask, and before I can even register, she has marched right on up and into me and is squeezing me hard around my waist and reflexively I am squeezing back, hugging her close to me and it feels lovely beyond what words could ever convey. Take that, poetry.

“Stacey and I have work chores at the hostel. Cleaning and stuff. Pays our way. Can't say no when they ask. Sometimes they send us out to other places that need us, but today we're just staying home. I'll never get it as clean as this place, though, that's for sure.”

She hugs me quietly for a bit more. I absorb it, with every available nerve ending, for several silent seconds.

“Thanks for being uncommon,” says the broken mold herself.

“See, didn't I tell you I wasn't like those other guys?”

“No, you're just like them. But you're uncommon for at least trying not to be.”

Cover blown. Do I hate being seen, being known like that? Do I love it?

“Could I walk with you?” I say. “To the hostel?”

“Sure you can,” she says, stepping back and hooking my broken arm with her probably formerly broken one.

It stinks like she's been hoarding shrimp tails and chicken bones in there.

•   •   •

Stacey is at the top of the creaky wooden steps that lead to the front door of the old Victorian that is now the St. Cecelia Youth Hostel. Stacey doesn't look saintly or even youthful but does look like a mean hostile old lady as we ascend the stairs toward her. Feels like a lot of stairs.

“Did you ball my innocent and trusting young friend, you wicked thing?”

I am about to protest the language at least, when Molly turns to me, asking loudly, “Is she talking to you, or me?”

Not that it changes the honest answer in either case, though if it's me, I plan to make a little ambiguity go a long way in a good cause.

No matter, since Mother Stacey is grinning at us by the time we reach her anyway.

“I see,” she says, poking me in the ribs with a finger like a hockey stick that almost sends me tumbling backward whence I came. “The old, would-you-like-to-come-up-to-my-place-and-see-my-father's-book-of-poetry ploy, eh? Had a lot of success with that one have ya, studley?”

“A one-hundred-percent success rate so far, now that you ask.”

“Ahh, that's sweet.” She pokes me again, and it's even harder.

She can poke me all she wants, because nothing that's happened today is doing anything to lessen the whole experience for me. I feel like I'm living, here, with these two, reputation enhancement or not. Living more than I did in the past, and I'm loving it and too grateful to tell them.

But I am starting to wonder if Stacey is seriously displeased, or playing, or some of both, and why? Not that I could ever say it, but with Molly's track record, what do I matter, in the overall scheme of things?

“Well, we've got sins to scrub away,” Stacey says, pulling Molly under a big protective paw and hauling her inside.

“See ya later, Kiki,” Molly calls over her shoulder, a sort of wrestle going on just for her to get an angle to wave back at me properly. “It was really wonderful. You were really wonderful.”

“Oh jeez, stop it already,” Stacey barks at her.

She is clearly getting all kinds of wrong impression there.

I just might have the beginnings of a reputation, a life,
and
a tribe that will let me be an insider.

For my next trick, I'm thinking I may walk on my hands all the way back, to my home, from theirs.

WHERE THEY DON'T HAVE TO TAKE YOU IN, BUT THEY DO

M
aybe there was a reasonable explanation,” Jasper said as he led me down the abandoned train tracks again. We were not walking back to school, just walking to walk, leaving Michelle the Renter on the steps waiting for the Homeowner. And walk we did. The six miles
almost
to the school, and then turning, without break, in the direction of home again.

His home, that was. Because he had one.

“The explanation is, he's a selfish, cowardly bastard,” I said. We had just made the pivot point onto the return leg. My phone rang, again. There were only two people who would be likely to call me, and one of them was right beside me, urging me to answer.

“Perhaps, if you hear what he has to say, the answer might have a little more complexity to it than that.”

“Whose side are you on here, Jasper?”

“Side? Jesus, Kiki, does everything have to be like that? You have a gift for seeing these imaginary forces always aligned against you. Of course I am on your side. But can't I be
for
you without being
against
your father?”

I was walking at a good clip now, breaking a sweat. He was keeping up but hanging a couple of steps behind as we talked. Probably trying to unsettle me.

“No!” I said, with the ringtone as accompaniment. “And don't call me Kiki.”

“Grrr,” he said. “Grr. Right, right, you know what you are? I just realized, you know what you are?”

“I'm pretty sure nothing that started with that question has ever ended well, so I'm just going to not answer.”

It was a pretty flawed blocking strategy.

“You are like an opposite Walter Mitty character. You're an inverse Walter Mitty, is what you are. You know the character, Walter Mitty, who fantasizes his way into all kinds of fantastic situations where life is exciting and he is the star?”

I did not have to entertain him if I chose not to.

“Never met the man,” I said, walking just a bit faster.

“Doesn't matter. You are the inverse, because you spend your time constantly imagining that everything is terrible and everyone is conspiring wickedness and you are the victim. You are the Walter Mitty of self-pity.”

Sometimes you hear something and immediately recognize it as something evil that needs instant extinguishing.

“Hey,” he said, all chipper all of a sudden. “Did you hear that? The Walter Mitty of self-pity. Oh, that has wheels, that one. Don't you—”

“No!” I snapped because I very well heard it and did not love the thought of hearing it for the rest of my life. “Just go back to calling me Kiki, that'll be fine.”

He was laughing robustly when my phone rang again. He didn't tell me to answer it this time. Instead, he scooted right up behind me and snagged the thing right out of my pants pocket.

“Hey!” I shouted as he raced past me and up the tracks.

“Hello,” he said, running hard to stay just out of my reach. “Yes, sir. Jasper. His friend. Yup, I'm the one.”

“Give me that,” I said, grabbing the phone and giving the side of his head a well-earned smack at the same time. Jasper stopped running and started laughing as I addressed the caller.

“So, your new roommate is all moved in now, I guess. Excellent. Have a good summer, and stop calling me.” I hung up on him.

Jasper and I resumed walking, but at a more reasonable talking pace.

“He's trying to discuss it with you,” he said.

“I don't want to hear it.”

“That's stupid.”

“I don't care what you think.”

“Well, ah, yes you do. More likely, you are afraid to hear him out because he might say something perfectly reasonable and then that'll blow the
Good Ship Boo-fucking-hoo
right out of the water. Then where will you be?”

I couldn't be sure but I was getting the impression Jasper had the stamina to keep up with this indefinitely. I knew I couldn't.

It was already exhausting me.
I
was exhausting me.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I said, stopping and grabbing him desperately by the collar. “You might have some points in there somewhere. Maybe. But you know, Jasper, it's been a pretty shit couple of years, parents breaking up—twice. Coming to live with my dad, feeling like this was going to be an awesome new turn in both of our lives until he welcomes me as if I had come to audit his taxes for the last ten years. I haven't been able to get my feet under me for long enough to believe I'm not a total cripple, and the only person I have been able to make any real contact with at all is you. And you're an asshole.”

I felt like I had already kind of tested my limits there with Mr. Jasper as he stood silently, looking me in the eyes. Then he looked at my hands still clutching his shirt.

“This actually makes you seem almost kinda manly, this thing you're doing with the grabbing.”

“Sorry, man,” I said, letting go and for some reason brushing my hands off quickly on my own shirt. “I just can't talk to him today, all right? I'm way too angry to even listen to him. I mean, whatever he has to say, it doesn't change the reality that that woman takes over our house—sorry,
his
house since obviously I don't own squat—next week! And I didn't know anything about it until
she
told
me.”

“Fair enough, fair enough,” he said, first holding up his hands like he was stopping traffic, then patting me on the chest warmly with them. “So, let me ask, would you say yes to dinner at my house this time?”

I actually focus for a couple seconds, on the sensation caused by his simply putting his hands flat on my chest. Nice. Human contact, even small measures, was a very welcome something I had been missing.

“If you didn't invite me, I was just going to invite myself.”

•   •   •

As we walked up the stairs to Jasper's second-floor apartment, I remembered my remark about Dad's house and how I didn't own anything. I regretted my tone, and my presumption that owning property was just a happy natural something, like beards or breasts, that would eventually come to everybody.

“Is your mother not here?” I asked as I sat at his tidy pine kitchen table. It had three matching chairs, with the fourth side pushed up to a wall.

“Nah, Ma works these hours usually. She's a cook, so that means most nights around now she's cooking a lot of other folks their dinner while I am cooking my own. Sort of like we're cooking together, only separately. On her off nights, though, we cook together, only together.”

It got to me, that last bit. “That's, pretty great, Jasper, the way you guys work.”

He was systematically assembling items on the counter by the stove in preparation for his cooking. “Yeah. We're cool, Ma and me.”

I knew it was just the two of them living here, but I hadn't asked about any other parties and possible whereabouts. Now, though, there didn't seem to be any pieces missing.

Naturally, I wanted to blurt out how I was jealous and he was lucky, and how I didn't have anybody like that anywhere in my life. But I had learned at least enough to know that if I did any bellyaching now, I'd be doing it on an empty stomach and out on the street.

Which would have been bad. My stomach, come to think of it, was looking forward to dinner.

Jasper went at it like a professional diner chef. He flipped on a radio, which sat on a shelf above the stove, nestled in with all the little cylinders of spices. Classic rock played over his head and wafted my way while he threw ingredients at a big, snapping, popping, oily skillet. It was a heavy metal pan, that skillet, and could swiftly make a pancake out of any unruly diner.

“Get back, or I will surely bash you,” he said when I ventured innocently toward his handiwork. “You'll see it when it's ready, which will be a couple more minutes. Till then you'll just have to sit there and make do with the scent.”

The scent would just about do all by itself.

A song by the Supremes started up. Immediately, I was taken somewhere else as I recognized it as a personal favorite of my mother's. She had very few favorites, as she was no great lover of music, so this was something. “The Happening,” that was the name of the song. It was a good choice for a person who was only going to have a few favorites. Made me bob my head in time.

I scanned the room, just killing time. There wasn't much room to scan anyway, and the wall right next to me on the table's fourth side had a big framed picture of Jesus flashing his Sacred Heart down on everybody. I thought he was supposed to be more modest than that.

He was useful, though, just to fill out a foursome if Jasper and his mother and I were playing pinochle or bridge or something. He obviously couldn't play, but he'd look good filling the space, like those people they hire to cover for stars when they go to the bathroom during the Academy Awards show.

I was thinking about Jesus and his heart filling one of those toilet seats at the Oscars when my phone blipped its text message signal. The Lord's distraction must have caused me to open the message from Dad.

I was afraid to tell you the plans. I was wrong.

It could have been three hours I stared at that message but I only became aware of time again when Jasper slapped two big aromatic plates down on the table.

“Oh,” I said, startled. Anyone would have been. “Did you just make all this? Just now?”

He deposited the food, cutlery, condiments, and napkins on the table and then went back to the fridge. “No, I phoned for takeout and had it delivered. What did you think I was doing over there all that time?”

“Well, cooking, of course,” I said. “But I meant, specifically, this, did you
make
this, like from the ground up as opposed to heating ready-made?” I bent low to inhale the vapors off what looked like the finest hash I had ever encountered. There was an extra-large poached egg settled bull's-eye in the middle of it all, with barbecued beans and chunky buttered cornbread on the sides.

“I guess that's your version of a compliment to the chef, so thanks. Yes, I did every bit of it. Okay, not the cornbread. Ma gets to tuck away bits and pieces from work, off cuts of meat, produce that's approaching sell-by, the kind of thing that isn't of use to them but that makes dynamite casserole/hash/stir-fry kind of deals around here. Oh, and stale cornbread, which fries up spectacularly.”

“Outrageous,” I said, talking through my food like a barbarian. The classic rock guys were sending us rockabilly something now, which was thoughtful.

“Good, then Chef is pleased,” he said as he took the seat opposite me. He plunked down a big bottle of Coke and two pint glasses half filled with ice. Then, he started pouring from the main attraction.

“What is that?” I asked when he had unloaded golden-brown something into each glass.

“My mother's dark rum,” he said, topping both glasses off with the Coke. He passed one over to me.

“Should you be taking it?” I asked.

He extended his glass across the table where it was met by mine and we achieved clink.

“It was a gift from her boss, who got it as a gift himself. But he hates the stuff. Then she brought it home. We tried it the other night and lucky us, she hates it too. She told me it was all mine . . . but I suppose you can have a little.”

“Lucky us,” I said.

“A toast to the end of the school year,” he said, reclinking before drinking.

“And the beginning of summer,” I said with a bit of a sneer.

He frowned at me, but drank deeply.

I drank, maybe a little less deeply, but enough to draw a conclusion.

“Who in the world could not love this?” I said, looking at the glass like the answer was readable there. The rich heavy rum went right down into my stomach and spread out to warm all areas of my torso. I hadn't done a great deal of drinking up to that point, but enough to know when something nice agreed with me and this was that something nice. Certainly something like a miracle was at work that could get the loveliness down into my belly
and
all up and tingly under my scalp at the same time.

“Glad you like it,” he said. “Don't let your food get cold. I wouldn't want to see what all those scraps looked like if they congealed and tried to re-form into what they once were.”

“Ha!” I said, finding the funny to way outweigh the queasy in that sequence. I applied myself to the task of conspicuous consumption, savoring every bite of every bit.

And every sip and every slug.

“I know,” Jasper said even though I was pretty sure I hadn't said anything for him to agree with.

“I know,” I said in turn to the glow-chested dinner companion levitating on my right. Jasper was leaning over and topping up my drink, which was approximately number three. It would have been tough to get a precise read on that because he was just alternating top-ups now, rather than mixing every time. A rum, then a Coke, then next time a rum again. They were practically the same color, so no matter.

Ping. Text message.

“Whoa, somebody's suddenly popular,” he said as I retrieved it.

Truth is summer planned long ago before you came. Vy complicated. Teaching. Peru. Brilliant opportunity. Thought you would go back to Mom anyway. We should talk.

“Uh-oh,” Jasper said, looking at my face.

I handed him my phone, and went immediately back to the last few bites of my meal. Then I put down my fork and sat back, patting my belly with both hands like you're supposed to at such moments.

“Best meal I ever had, in my whole life, Jasper my friend. I cannot thank you enough.”

From our opposite sides, we both made the same move, lurching across the table, as he handed back my phone and I collected my drink.

“That's not so great, huh?” he said, pointing at my phone as if that were necessary.