Stay with Me (6 page)

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Authors: Paul Griffin

BOOK: Stay with Me
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“Actually, kid, I can’t.” He messes up my hair and goes.
I pull the linens from the rack and count the creaks in the steps. When I’m sure he’s downstairs, I bury my face in the napkins so nobody hears me. I can’t breathe. In two weeks my best friend is on a plane, headed for boot camp.
 
 
(The next afternoon, Monday, June 15, the fourth day . . . )
 
After last period I head for the library, basically where people go to take part in the unending spitball war that has been plaguing my class since the fifth grade. How many times have I scratched a monster zit on the back of my neck only to discover it was a masticated quarter page of
Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition
?
Mustering a rare burst of initiative, I’d booked the back room for a study session for kids who were thinking about taking the G and T. I advertised it on my Facebook page and hung a lame sign on the announcement board. As I’m walking into the study room, my ESP zings me: I’m going to be the only one who attends the session.
I am correct.
I dump my backpack. Yupper, I left it home, the book I need. I’m hungry and grumpy and so flipping hot and why can’t I stop wondering why the junkie dishwasher avoids me at work? Or am I a paranoid loser? “Or am I both paranoid
and
shunned?”
“Who you talking to?” Nicole Reeni swings into the room. She’s breathless, spitballs in her hair.
“Thanks for coming, Nicky,” I say.
“What are you
talking
about? G and T study session? I’d rather pick the corn out of my crap.”
“I want your life, Nic.”
She drops six quarters into the soda machine,
clunk
goes the Fanta Zero, and the Reenster bounces.
One more week of school, and then I go from working weekends to slinging hash full-time at the just barely airconditioned Too in a one hundred percent synthetic fiber uniform that went out of style in 1954. I so rule this Earth.
THE NINTH DAY . . .
 
(Saturday, June 20, morning)
 
MACK:
 
When she laughs, she snorts the tiniest bit. I like that. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all week, her smile. Her. I double-checked the schedule. She’s definitely on tonight.
“I shouldn’t mess with this girl, Boo. Why start something that can’t last?”
My girl Boo cocks her head. She’s bouncing back good. Cuts look clean, closing up nice. She’s eating. She’s strong enough to take with me on my dog walking rounds.
“Boo.”
She cocks her head twice. Brown eyes, big and pretty.
 
First dog I pick up is another pit, big red-nose goofball. What happens next all happens in about a second and a half.
Boo goes for Red’s neck, just like I knew she would. I say “Ey” as I bump Boo’s shank with the back of my sneaker. She spins to me. I snap the lead hard to pull her behind me and put myself between her and the other dog. Her eyes bug on me. Her ears go from high and forward to back and soft. I’m standing tall and strong, my head up high and proud as I lock eyes with her and say real quiet, slow and deep, “I got it.” Meaning that I got the situation under control. I won’t let anybody hurt her, dog or human. Dogs don’t know what you’re saying, but they know what you mean. Now her tail goes soft too and into a nice easy slope. Her hackles flatten. Her eyes are soft on me and only me. Rest of the walk she’s an angel.
I wouldn’t trust her alone with another dog yet or maybe ever, but as long as she’s with a human who will take the lead, she’ll be peaceable. They only fight because they’re scared the other dog is going to get them first, and wouldn’t you be if your whole life was fighting?
Before you know it, six dogs are trotting along behind me, nice slack leashes, and it occurs to me I wish I could play guitar. Never let a dog walk in front of you, especially when you’re going through a door. There’s leaders and followers, and I wish I didn’t have to be either one. For my probation once they made me run rec center track. Winning made me feel worse than losing. I felt good when I quit. But with dogs, you have to force yourself to be a winner. Losers make them nervous.
Thing about walking dogs is it goes pretty good with thinking, and I can’t quit dreaming of Céce. We’re holding each other, and I’m not afraid to look her in the eye.
Tony keeps pushing hints. Did I know that Céce loves movies, and wouldn’t it be sweet for her to have somebody to go with after Tony heads south? I don’t like movies too much because you can’t talk to her and you don’t know if you should hold her hand or when to kiss her and how far does she want you to go and stuff like that. I’d like to walk with her again instead. Her, me, and Boo.
Me and the dogs climb through the cheat weed hills to where the grass softens and gets long in the swaying tree shade, and we lose ourselves in the wildwood.
This is my secret place, the graveyard. The people who owned this land before they gave it to the city are buried here. Ten crypts, all worn by rain and mossed over. Nobody comes to visit them except me, and they let me sip the quiet. I lie back in the high grass and watch the hot wind punch it, and the dogs settle in around me.
I see signs taped to the light poles. Land, cheap. Six hundred bucks an acre. Have to clear the trees yourself. Get me fifty acres, build a cabin of the deadwood, have like twenty pits with me, nobody messes with us. I wonder if Céce likes the woods.
She’s going to find out about me any day now. Everybody does sooner or later. That I got a record.
 
Me and Boo drop off the other dogs. Up on the main drag the vendors are out with their tables and signs that say EVERYTHING A DOLLAR. A buck picks up a wrong-made soccer ball for Boo. Pits like to chew soccer balls, so don’t take them to a tight match. I see real nice fake leather wallets and stuff. I nod polite to the old lady behind the table, just like my mom taught me. “Ma’am, you got any ideas about what a girl would like in the way of a present?”
“What’s she like?” lady says.
“Reckon she’s fifteen, about so high.”
“Fifteen and so high, you got to get her a phone case.” She points to a bin of a thousand pink phone cases. They’re a little moldy, but other than that they look pretty good. Thing is, I heard a rumor that girls don’t like to wear phone cases. “What else you got?”
“How much money you got to spend, chico?”
I fish my pocket. “’ Bout a sourbuck.”
“Gets you a gorgeous little piece of magic.” She dumps a bucket onto the counter, and all this real sparkly jewelry comes out, stickpins with diamonds on them shaped out into letters. “Will you just look at these?” she says. “Stunning, no?”
“Whoa.”
“What’s her name?”
“Like Céce.”
“
Chee
-chee? You kidding?”
“I don’t believe I am at all.”
“Lovely name.” She hunts for a
C,
can’t find one.
“Is that there a . . . wait. That one. That a
Q
?”
“G,”
she says.
“I’ll take it.” I swap her the ten bucks for the
G,
pull my army knife and clip the little thing off the
G
. It passes pretty good for a
C
now. Old lady’s nodding at me.
I walk away eleven bucks lighter for two items, which is about the way it always goes for me at the Everything A Dollar table. The lady chucks me a moldy phone case. “On the house.”
I study the pin in a slash of sunlight twice bent off the tenement windows. The diamonds come alive. I look at Boo. She wags her tail. We head off. I’m pretty sure I’m levitating. A hawk’s wings are lifting me. I have a sparkly
G
-turned-
C
stickpin in my pocket.
 
I stop off in the basement to grab a water jug before I head up to the roof to bed my Boo for the night while I’m at work.
Pops is watching afternoon TV. “Get that goddamn dog out of here.”
“I will.”
“Y’all take that goddamn mountain of trash to the curb like I ast you last night?”
“I did.”
“Make sure you double-check the door is shut on yer way out. Woke up this morning and the goddamn thing was left wide open, mister.”
That’s because you left it open when you stumbled in smashed this morning,
I don’t say. “I will,” I say. I pull my pay from my back pocket and fork him my share of the rent.
Don’t he just count it too, before he shoves it into his pocket. “Don’t be late for work neither.”
“I won’t.”
“I got
no
time for latecomers in my book. Be on time or be gone.” He sips beer and burps and his phone rings, and he picks it up, and he’s like “Oh, yeah, hey, how y’all doin’, missy? Sure, we can forty-up right out back if you want,” and I ain’t even in his world no more.
 
Boo’s going to sleep good tonight after all that walking we did today. She’s curled up in her pen and snoring. I put a street-found air conditioner in the front window, but it’s cool enough out. I raise the side windows and get the fans I found at the construction site pulling in a good strong breeze. Found this CD player in the trash too. Had a disc of soft piano music in it. I keep it on loop for Boo. I don’t use the radio part of it, because when the wind changes, you get static sometimes, and I don’t need that at all.
I’m heading out of the hutch when this old stoop-back crank Larry comes up to the roof to hang his wet sheets. Larry is the brand of idiot who catcalls at the ladies when they’re getting off the train. I see him out on the street, telling them what he would do to them if he got the chance. He nods at the elevator housing. “You better not have another dog in there. I’ll call the cops. When is it going to sink into that bag of dirt renting space in your skull? No dogs allowed in this building.”
“No cats either.” Larry has cats, which I don’t mind. Cats are sly, but they’re all right sometimes, especially the ones who act like dogs.
“Filthy, dogs are. The stink gets into my sheets.”
Why can’t folks just leave folks alone? Serious, why do they always need to mess with you? I force myself to head for the stairs.
“Look at him running away now. Look at him go. Queer bait. If I kicked that dog in front of you, you wouldn’t do anything but bawl like a baby hungry for the tit.”
And that’s when it comes, just a flicker of it, that low note of a hiss always hanging deep in my mind. A sound that can’t decide if it wants to swell or fade. I tell myself to keep walking, but I’m not me anymore. I’m a rag puppet trying to get free of the strings. Getting jerked up high and fast into a sky hot enough to char the blue from itself. No air up here. Rib cage is caving in like these two fierce arms are clawing me from behind. The invisible hands turn me around real, real slow. I hear the hissing so loud that I can’t quite hear myself, or whatever is making me say “I’m warning you, man, first and last.” I sound like I’m underwater.
“Waste of life. You warn me? I was in the navy. The only reason you’re standing here free on this roof to disrespect me is because I fought for your right to do it.”
“Thank you for your service, but if you mess with my dog, I will hurt you, man. That’s no promise either. That’s a threat. I mean the other way around.” I’m shaking bad.
Larry hangs his sheets, laughing at me. I can’t hear him. Just the radio static now. He mouths
Punk
as he heads downstairs. I make my hands into fists to keep myself from reaching into my back pocket and pulling my lock-blade. I’m liable to break my fingers, I’m balling them so tight.
Takes a while for the heat to float off me, and then I drop hard back into my body, and I’m so heavy with the fear of what I almost did, I have to sit down. My mind is so crunched up there’s room for only one thought: I have to give Céce the pin. What’s the worst that could happen? I scare her off?
That would suck.
The minutes click by a little faster, and time becomes real time, and I’m back in the everydayness of things. I double-check the padlock on the elevator housing door. Only the old man and me have the key for it. Good solid door. Heavy metal to keep out the thieves, or at least Larry.

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