Killing Time in Crystal City (16 page)

I have to listen again as he spits more hateful filth over the shoes and bags and dresses that he hurls across the room. But it ends when he hums with satisfaction, and then I hear the familiar jingle of coins, a fat-bellied lot of coins. I look over my shoulder just as the pink porcelain piggy bank comes up, and down again, pushed, stuffed, squeezed into the pack, which has no room for it, and which now weighs one whole more me.

I feel like a two-legged newborn colt trying to manage the trip down the stairs. Howard, who is turning out to be a finer teammate every minute, is playfully and unhelpfully pushing and pulling from behind making it a lot more treacherous.

There are still maybe ten stairs to go when we hear Mickey shout, “Back! Coming from the back!” and that's all.

“Holy shit,” Howard says, and I don't even get a chance to contribute anything at all before I feel the overwhelming shove riding on the back of the gravity that had already been working on me. I'm pitched forward, both arms outstretched like Superman, only nothing at all like Superman and my elbows crash and my ribs take an almighty crunching as Howard tramples right over the back of me and bombs forward and out the front door.

I am in a heap and in pain in eight places as I thrash and writhe my way through insane panic and the convoluted strappings of the old, overstuffed backpack. It feels like hours I'm struggling to escape and I can hear things crackling and snapping among the merchandise. I am sad and sorry for that because none of it is mine to break and who the fuck am I, anyway? Though I can't see or hear anybody at all, I have the overwhelming feeling that I am being observed in this most horrific moment of my sorry, sorry life. There is a thickening of the air over my final struggles to break away. It's nearly bringing tears of humiliation and definitely bringing asthmatic wheezings of panic.

The backpack simply won't let me go. I burst up and away, still lugging the sea-monster bag full of all those things that do belong here, and I bolt for the door because I do not and knew that all along, and shame on me for that, for everything.

I am at the door already when I realize that in my freaking I ran the wrong way. At the minute I simply do not care, and outside is all that matters, so I go right on and shoot out that back door, through these people's modest little backyard. I still don't sense anybody anywhere and I'd keep running even if I did. Through the hedge into the dense greenery growing next to the lazy slow canal that I know is just another short way ahead. I smell it, and am overcome that I can.

HELLO GOOD-BYE

H
angover and confusion fermented into rage during the sweaty stomp between Jasper's house and Dad's. By the time I walked through the door, I was totally toxic, so his decision—for the first time since I had arrived here—to come rushing to greet me at the door was an unfortunate one.

“Kevin!” he called, like exactly the way I imagined the scene to play out when I first
chose
his house, his life, his company, over everybody else's. “I have been dying to—”

I shoved him right aside, and into the hall tree full of jackets, and kept on my way. As he bumbled and stumbled around I went directly to the breakfast bar, pulled the shiny, sturdy, stainless-steel laptop out of my bag, and tested its ruggedness by slamming it down hard.

“What are you doing?” he said, coming after me.

I had very little idea what I was doing.

“I don't want that thing,” I said. “You'll put it to good use, I'm sure.”

He grabbed me from behind as I was heading for my room. I spun around, glared at his hand on my shoulder, and he removed it.

There he was, standing in his pale blue shirt and his dark blue tie and the beginnings of his sweat stains blooming already at the armpits. Every bit the big-deal, small-town, perpetually perspiring high school principal heading for the last day of the school year and all the summer thrills he couldn't wait to start spanking on.

“Please?” he said weakly, holding the laptop and pushing it on me. “Do keep it. And get yourself cleaned up and ready and we'll ride in together. We'll talk.”

“What will we talk about? Peru?”

He said nothing, but his down and up and side-to-side eyes said Peru to me.

“Fuck you. I'm done with your school, and with you,” I shouted, and turned again toward my bedroom.

He grabbed me again. He grabbed me, again. On the worst morning for grabbing ever.

I wheeled around on him, and with every ounce of raging resentment flowing through me I swung the looping punch straight for my father's lying mouth.

I was already thrilling on the terrified eyes of him when he brought up the armored laptop just in time to block the hardest punch I will ever throw.

“Shiiiiiiiiit!” I screamed, dropping right down to my knees and wrapping my left hand around my right wrist because if I didn't, it felt like it would just break up and fall to the floor in a bony bloody mess.

•   •   •

We were sitting in another waiting room, after emergency, after exam, after X-ray confirmed the broken bone in my wrist caused by my feeble idea of a punch. The doctor said it was a very small fracture in one of the very small bones of the wrist. It was borderline whether a cast was needed, and often patients opt for just a splint or even an ace bandage.

We were waiting to get my cast fitted. I figured I had earned this cast. If they had offered to plant a little flag in it like on a moon landing, I would have gone for that, too.

“Remember how great we were before?” Dad said, cutting a long silence to shreds.

“Don't,” I said.

“Do you remember us, Kevin-Eleven?”

“I still have one healthy hand. And elbows and feet and knees if necessary,” I said.

We sank back into silence until a very long time later when I got called in finally to get casted up. I think we were both relieved to be separated just then.

In fact, I know we were.

“He left this for you,” the receptionist nurse said when she finally noticed the little boy with the cast looking all around for his father.

Inside the envelope there was a sticky note, a bank card, and not very much money.

The note:
Had to get to the school. Withdraw some cash (PIN: 1396). Take a cab. Get some rest. Wait there for me. Love.

The coward.

I got the cash, the maximum daily limit. Went home, sat in a bath with my arm hanging over the side. I dressed, packed a few things, added my bit of saved money to my father's generous contribution.

I left his bank card on top of the laptop on top of the breakfast bar, and walked out of the place I did not belong, to find the place I did.

THE WAGES OF SIN

I
can only imagine what I look, smell, and sound like when I get my breathing only partway under control prior to putting that blessed key into that forgiving lock.

And I don't want to imagine it. I just want to be inside, bury this bag of booty in my closet until I can be rid of it somehow, and have a shower. I am going to wash as much of this shameful shit off me as I can and start learning to live with the rest. So, I
belonged
for a few minutes there. Is that what I was looking for? Belonging to
that,
to
them
?
Trading in whatever better self I possessed for that honor?

I turn to shut the door on all that and leave it outside.

“Just get in,
in
,” Howard says in an urgent whisper. He has his big fuck-off flick knife pressed right at my navel as he backs me in and closes the door behind him.

“Here,” I say, panicky, trying once more to wriggle out of the backpack. “Just take it all, man, and go. I don't want my cut at all.”

He is leering at me sickeningly as he uses the scary sharp knife to slice through the pack's straps like they were string cheese. The pack thumps to the floor. There is no way the real man of the house does not hear this, even if he's napping.

“Your cut? Shithead, there is no
your
cut. There never was. God, you're a fuckin' chump. How you likin' hangin' with the underclasses now, sweetie?” He gives me a shove toward the kitchen and follows behind me.

I can smell that sometime earlier Syd was doing something nice with garlic and pork and I think cider vinegar. That would have been a time and a place to be. Would have been exactly the time and the place to be.

Right down the block from the stupid shit I was doing.

As we pass, it catches my eye that Syd's bedroom door is open. It's never open.

Just inside the kitchen, Howard gestures to the back door, where in the panel of tempered glass, my humiliation is multiplied by the sight of Mickey and Tailbone laughing at me.

“Go let them in,” Howard says, and immediately begins his well-practiced prowl through somebody else's home.

I open the back door at the new lowest point of my life.

“Nothing personal,” Mickey says in a manner that makes it sound almost true. They have just stepped inside when a wall-shaking commotion kicks off in another room.

I freeze, and more important the other two do as well. We wait, through the crashing and banging, one great bellow of fury, and another howl of terror and pain.

Then, Howard comes staggering backward into our view, falling on his back across the threshold between kitchen and hallway. His own big flick knife is sticking up out of his abdomen as all the blood and life of him pours out of his completely motionless body.

Tailbone and Mickey, the other members of Howard's “family,” nearly knock each other out in the scrum to get through the back door and away from it all first. The words “honor” and “thieves” swirl circles around each other in my mind.

I feel panic in the most tangible way. I think of the train that I never heard, running past Jasper's house, as I try to slow my locomotive breathing.

Syd appears, stepping over Dead Howard after looking close enough to confirm he was Dead Howard.

His words to me are cool, but I am only too aware how much effort it is taking him to maintain it. “It's one of my unbreakable rules, Kevin, that a person who enters my house with a knife in his hand, leaves it with that knife in his gut.”

“Good rule,” I try to say, but it's only whispers because my vocal cords have been shocked into rigidity. I clear my throat. “What do we do now?”

“Well,
you
are going to try not to touch anything more than what you have to while you pack up your things.”

The fact that I will be moving on again comes as neither a shock nor a disappointment.

“Can I have a shower first?” I ask. “I'm kind of rank.”

“Sure,” he says, “we're not barbarians, after all.”

•   •   •

The numbness I feel is almost peaceful, though it makes the shower a strange sensation. I don't quite get the tactile feel of the water pit-patting my skin, but clean is coming and that's the sensation I really need.

There's a dead guy in the kitchen. A
person
. Not a
good
person, but a somebody. A somebody I knew and spent time with and who talked, and who's never going to talk again. I can't believe I am here, that I'm in a place where people get killed. Jasper never killed anybody when I was at
his
place.

Jasper's place. That would be a nice place to be now.

•   •   •

“What the hell is this?” Syd barks as I step out of the bathroom. I can all but hear the tough fibrous muscles of my heart tear wide open with the fright.

“Jesus, Uncle Sydney,” I say, holding on to the wall with one hand and my chest with the other.

“Sorry, Kev, a little abrupt there, should have given you warning. But for chrissake,
poetry
?”

“Yeah, right?”

“He's published a book of
poems
?”

This could take a good while for Syd to wrap his head around. To Syd, this kind of strange, artistic behavior registers more than murder, apparently, which is one more excellent reminder that I need to get out of here rapidly.

“That would appear to be so, yes.”

“Did you know he was into this weird shit?”

This leap has got to be like interplanetary travel as far as my father's brother is concerned, but I cannot be his guide through it.

“I knew, some. I knew he wrote. The collection, though, came as a surprise to me. What can I say, Syd?” I shrug as dramatically as I can.

“I shouldn't be surprised, though. He always had poetry written all over him, the freak. How did it get here?”

Ah. That.

“Came in the mail, Syd.”

“The mail. Huh. So the bastard did know you were here.”

“The bastard did, it seems.”

He hands me the copy of
Mind Monkeys
, shaking his head sadly. I head to my room to add it to my already packed bag.

“Hey,” he calls, summoning me back.

I walk apprehensively to where he's still standing in front of the bathroom.

“Did you wear my bathrobe? The thick, soft, white one that hangs in the bathroom closet? Because it smells funny.”

How is it that this small question can bring my heartbeat thundering back up as high as anything else that's happened lately?

“Um, uh, sorry, Syd . . .”

“Did I forget to tell you not to touch my bathrobe?”

“Honestly, Syd, I think you forgot. Because if you ever told me something like that, I'd never have done it.” I become acutely aware I am talking to a killer. A killer who is not happy with me.

He nods calmly at me. “It smells girly funny. Are you a freak, too?”

About three different times I feel like I am about to give an answer but it stalls out each time.

“Can I get back to you on that?” I ask.

He turns and walks toward his bedroom.

“No, you cannot,” he says.

•   •   •

When we meet again a few minutes later, Syd is sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, eating an avocado with a spoon, and staring with contempt at Howard the dead mess on his floor.

“Can I ask you one last thing?” I ask, standing over him as he looks up with a wry expression.

“I'm listening.”

I hold out my arm, with the cast. “Could you cut this off for me? I don't think I need it anymore.”

He gets up, goes to the deep kitchen drawer, the bottom one that holds all the mad miscellany. Then he comes at me with a tool that looks like the missing link between wire cutters and bolt cutters.

“Wow,” I say as he buzzes up the plaster from elbow to palm as if he is filleting a tender fish. “That is some serious implement.”

“Yes,” he says with a flourish as he makes the final cut and the cast drops to the floor without much of a thud at all. “It's a quality thing. And you would be surprised at how many useful applications it has.”

I am flexing my muscles, opening and closing my fist, marveling at how skinny my forearm looks, when he stands up, reaches over me, and tucks the cutters down into my pack.

“Thanks,” I say, standing up with him.

“That's your going-away present. Every man should have one of them things anyway.”

“I meant thanks for everything, Syd. I'm sorry if I let you down.”

This, the point where he could let me down easy and lessen my unease? He nods, instead.

“So, what are you going to do about this?” I say, gesturing at Dead Howard at the same time my uncle starts rather firmly ushering me to, and then through, the back entrance.

“Take care of yourself, Kevin. You're a good kid, in spite of it all. Go and live the life you're supposed to, whatever it is and wherever it is.”

“Thanks, Syd, I will,” I say, shaking his hand with my newly freed hand.

“And that map I gave you, of how to get here?”

“Yup?”

“Lose it.”

The door closes.