Threshold (9 page)

“No,” she replies. “But I wasn’t paying all that much attention,” deadpan solemn but enough of a smile that Deke can tell she knows he’s joking, and “More’s the pity,” he says and kisses her back, tastes her waxy black lipstick, and he can think of so many things he’d rather spend the night doing than watching Highland Avenue yuppies separate their whites from their colors.

“You want anything, Sadie?” Sheryl asks, talking to Sadie but looking at the clock and she should have been out of here five minutes ago. Sadie scowls at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, squints hard at the long row of bottles lined up back there, all concentration like she ever orders anything different, and “I think I’ll have a White Russian, please,” she says, finally, and Deacon would bet ten dollars she’s never had anything else, that somewhere, sometime, a White Russian was Sadie’s first taste of alcohol and she’s never seen any point in trying anything different.

Sadie opens her shiny coffin purse and digs out a wrinkled five, lays it on the counter while Sheryl adds vodka to ice cubes and half-and-half. “And give dumb-ass here another glass of that cow piss,” she says and grins at the bartender.

“Jesus, it must be my goddamn birthday,” Deke says. “Two free beers in one afternoon,” and he finishes his PBR, sets the mug down and slides it towards Sheryl as she puts Sadie’s White Russian on a cocktail napkin with a flaming eight ball printed on one side.

“No, just guilt money from home,” Sadie says and takes a mint-green slip of paper from her purse, a check with her father’s name printed neatly across the top and enough zeros that at least they won’t have to worry about paying the rent for another month. “As long as my mother’s new therapist keeps telling her it really
is
all her fault that I turned out this way, I figure we can expect a steady trickle,” and Sadie takes a sip of her drink before she puts the check safely back inside her purse and snaps the little coffin shut again.

“Well, it’s reassuring to know that at least one of us isn’t burdened with a conscience,” Deacon says, and Sadie punches him in the arm, not hard but he groans like she’s broken a bone, groans until she leans over and kisses his shoulder.

“Jesus, you guys are making me sick,” Sheryl mutters. “You know how long it’s been since I even had a
date
?” and Sadie sticks her tongue out at the bartender, tongue the color of milkstained bubble gum, and then turns back to Deacon.

“I saw your friend Chance at the post office today,” she says, and Deacon sips at his fresh beer, and “How’s she holding up?” he asks; Sadie shrugs and stirs at her drink with a red plastic swizzle stick.

“Beats me. She was buying stamps. You know she doesn’t like talking to me.”

“I don’t think Chance much likes talking to anybody these days, baby. I wouldn’t take it personally.”

“No, I’m pretty sure she thinks weird rubs off,” Sadie says and lays the swizzle stick on her napkin, stares at Deke with those unreal blue eyes like something in a taxidermist’s shop window, eyes like glass, and “She’s a very
detached
young lady.”

“Yeah?” and Deacon watches her in the mirror, watches her between the liquor bottles. “Well, I expect you’d be pretty detached too, Little Miss Pickled Sunshine, if you’d been through all the shit Chance has been through lately.” And she doesn’t say a word, no response but another shrug, Sadie’s eternal answer to a whole messy world of things she’d rather not think about.

Deacon runs his fingers through his short, mousebrown hair, not quite pissed at Sadie yet and hoping he didn’t sound that way because now she’s pouting, stirring aimlessly at her drink, and her lower lip looks like something a yellow jacket stung. But sometimes her callous goth-girl shtick is hard to stomach, sometimes like now, and suddenly Deacon feels very old and very tired, all the hell he’s caught, and he honestly can’t imagine how Chance Matthews is alive, still walking and talking. Someone like that almost enough to make you believe in bad luck or karma, the fucking sins of the father, someone like that enough to keep things in perspective.

“You didn’t have to
yell
at me,” Sadie says, almost whispers, and “I didn’t yell at you, Sadie,” Deacon says, and now they’re talking to each other through the mirror, too bad his parents never figured out this trick. It might have saved a lot of broken dishes.

“It’s not my fault she doesn’t like me,” and that’s enough to light the short and ragged fuse that’s never far beneath Deke’s skin, enough to get him up off the bar stool and moving towards the door. Forget the beer, forget Sadie, because he really doesn’t want to be anywhere near her or anyone else when the bomb in his head goes off.

But she’s already calling after him, still hasn’t learned when to let him go, when to shut up and sit it out until the shit blows over. “What the fuck did I say, Deacon?” she asks, raising her voice and Sheryl’s watching them both now, starting to look a lot more worried than she did about the fat man. Her smokedusty eyes doing all the talking, and Just keep walking, Deke, she’s trying to say without opening her mouth, Just keep on going, and she’ll get over it, and you’ll get over it, and nobody gets hurt this time. But Deke stops halfway to the red door, and “Every goddamn thing isn’t about you, Sadie.
This
isn’t about you.”

“I never said it was,” and god he hates the way she can flinch without moving a muscle, flinch with words like she’s afraid he’s going to hit her when he’s never laid a hand on her. “All I was saying—”

“All you were
saying,
Sadie, is that you’re just too goddamned simple or shallow or selfish or
whatever
to figure out why someone who’s lost everything, everyone she ever loved or gave two shits for, why someone like that can’t stop being miserable for five minutes to smile and make you feel like the sparkling center of the goddamn universe.”

Not even looking at Sadie in the mirror now, that much a coward, that much a jerk, but everything he needs to see right there in Sheryl’s green eyes, like just exactly how unnecessary that was, like how someone who spends every day hiding in the hooch because he can’t deal with his own life has a hell of a nerve telling anyone else to get a clue.

“Whatever,” Deacon Silvey says. And he turns away from Sheryl and Sadie and the cold beer he’s hardly touched, stalks past the cigarette machine and out of The Plaza’s crimson door, out of the mustycool shadows and into the merciless heat and sundrowned day he deserves.

Deacon had just turned nine and the beagle had been missing for three weeks, three stickyhot weeks in the middle of August, too hot to be outside, but him and Davey Barber and some other boys playing football behind Davey’s house, anyway. Someone passed Deacon the ball and he lost his balance, fell and tumbled crash into the puppy’s doghouse. Boys laughing and Deacon disoriented, his right ankle hurting, but he was about to get up and run for the garden hose stretched across the grass for a goal line when he smelled oranges, something like orange peels or raw fish, and he’d never even noticed how the two smelled so much alike.

“Hey, you okay, Deke?” and more laughter, then, Greg Musgrove calling him a pussy, and “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m fine. Just got my feet tangled up,” but that orangeandfish smell so strong, strong enough it was making him nauseous, making him gag, and he leaned back against the abandoned doghouse, eyes watering and trying not to puke.

And “Jesus, man, what’s the matter with you?” Davey asked him, but Deacon’s head hurt too much to answer, too much to even think, and if he opened his mouth he knew he’d puke for sure. The football rolling from his hands, bump to the ground, bouncing away, and by then all the boys standing around him while the smell dragged Deacon Silvey down and down, falling like something in a fairy story his mother read to him once, falling and going nowhere fast, and he saw the puppy, the older kids that took it away one night when everyone in Davey’s house was asleep, and “Oh,” he said. “Oh shit,” seeing the rest, seeing it all, but nothing else out of his mouth before he was vomiting, his lunch sprayed all over the nearest pair of sneakers, and someone was running for Davey’s mother, shouting, scared, and the world folded up like a crumpled paper cup, and Deacon tumbled into the black space left behind.

 

Straight to the hospital in an ambulance that time, paramedics and a stretcher and everything; not that he remembered the ride, the sirens blaring, or the emergency room, nothing but black and dreamless sleep until he opened his eyes in a white room that smelled like medicine and Pine-Sol, and his mother was crying.

“They killed it,” he said, words all croaky because his throat was so dry and sore, but needing to talk before he forgot, and his father turning away from the window, then, his father looking angry, inconvenienced, embarrassed, something Deacon knew was inappropriate, but his father looking that way, regardless. His mother crying louder, and “Davey’s dog,” Deacon said. “They killed it. It’s in the field.”

His father took one step closer to the bed, and “Son,” he said, “if you’re doing this just to get attention, you better tell us right this minute. Right now. Before it gets any more out of hand than it already has,” and the dazzling sun, sun setting like a fireball behind his father, too bright to look at, so he looked at his mother, instead.

“They killed it,” he said again, speaking to her because she only seemed frightened, not angry, not ready to blame him for whatever was happening, and she shook her head, not understanding, either.

“Killed what, Deke? We don’t know what you’re talking about.” And neither did he, not really, but telling her anyway while his father turned away, turned back to the window. Deacon telling her how the boys had stolen the puppy and beat it to death with a hammer, beat it until all its bones were broken, and then they’d nailed it to a tree in the field behind the high school and left it there. Telling her as fast as he could talk, before he forgot all their names, boys he didn’t know, and he could see she thought he was crazy, crazy or lying or both, maybe.

“You hit your head,” she said, talking to him like he was five years old or seventy-five, talking the way she talked to his grandmother at the nursing home. “You were playing football at Davey’s house, and you hit your head. Don’t you remember playing football, Deke?”

“I didn’t hit my head, Mom. I just twisted my ankle. I didn’t hit my head, I swear,” and his father turning around again, angry father framed in fire, and his mother was already uncovering his bare feet, and “His ankle’s swollen, Marty,” she said, mothervoice like something thin and brittle, like something strained.

“That doesn’t mean he isn’t lying. That doesn’t mean he didn’t hit his head,” and then his father staring at him, just staring at him, and bitter secrets behind Martin Silvey’s eyes that Deke could see but wouldn’t even begin to understand for years, old secrets dressed up like resentment or disappointment.

“You keep talking this way, Deacon, and they’re gonna start thinking you’re crazy. Do you know what that means, if they think you’re crazy?”

“You’re scaring him. Jesus, what’s the point of scaring him when he’s already lying here in a hospital bed, and we don’t even know what’s wrong with him.”

But his father not hearing her or not listening, leaning close now, faint smell of whiskey on his breath, and whatever Deacon had seen in his eyes before was gone, nothing left but a strange and serious concern.

“I’m not
trying
to scare you, Deke. You don’t know what these people, what these doctors, will believe, and sometimes it’s better if we keep the things we
think
we know to ourselves. It won’t fix anything, telling them about the dog. It won’t
change
things so that those boys never killed it. They might even get the idea
you
had something to do with it.”

His mother crying again, covering his swollen ankle, and she stepped out of the room, left him alone with his father, and Deacon knew he was going to cry, cry like his mother, cry like a girl, and he didn’t want his father to see. Wanted to go back to the black place that wasn’t a place, the place where nothing hurt and he didn’t have to think about why anyone would beat a puppy to death with a hammer or why his father was telling him he should pretend he hit his head or the doctors would think he was crazy.

“The puppy will still be dead, Deke,” his father said. “I just want you to realize you can’t change that. I want you to think about that,” and Deacon rolled over, pushed his face deep into his pillow to hide the tears, muffle the sobs he couldn’t swallow, and in a few more minutes his father followed his mother out into the hallway and left him alone in the white room.

 

Another week in the hospital, almost time for school to start again when they finally let him go home, a week of puzzled frowns from men and women in lab coats and still no explanation for his “seizure,” no matter how much blood they took from his arms or how many pictures they made of the inside of his head. And Deacon never told them about Davey Barber’s beagle.