Chinese Handcuffs

by Chris Crutcher

  If I could have sat him all the way up . . . she thinks. If I could have sat him all the way up, I could have saved him. She hates her mother for making her leave the room before they got the puzzle fixed. She was the only one in the world who really cared about Grampa. And the people who care about you are the only ones who can save you.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dear Preston,

  Been thinking a lot since I wrote last. Funny, most of it’s been about Stacy. My thoughts about her keep me in a constant state of confusion. I said before I hated that she loved you and not me, and that’s not exactly true. I didn’t hate that she loved you. I just hated that she didn’t love me. I fell into the trap of believing that strong feelings about a person are exclusive of feelings about any others. That’s what they tell us, but it’s a lie. The part of Stacy that liked me and talked with me and was intimate in all those ways that aren’t man-woman ways didn’t have anything to do with you. And her love for you, her attraction and her sexual draw toward you, didn’t have anything to do with me. I got them confused, I think; thought I couldn’t have my part without your part. I’m sorry I was such a smartass all those times I said things like “Why go for the Plymouth Duster when you can have the ’Vette?” I think that probably hurt you a lot because you believed the analogy. And truth be known, I probably did, too. I have some things to learn about unwarranted arrogance. I keep going back to this time I ran into her at the carnival. You might remember, it was the time I lost Christy and ended up spending three life sentences grounded to my room. I play it over like it happened yesterday—don’t have a clue why it’s important except that it tells me something about my roots with her and why she seems so important in my life.

  She hollers, “Wait up!” from around the corner, just back from the bottle throw. I hear her, recognize her voice, but I can’t see her through the crowd. “Wait!” she yells again, so I stand fast, holding Christy by the back of her coat collar, letting Stacy find me.

  “Look!” she yells, and finally I see her, sidestepping all the folks pressed up to the dart throw, dancing through the steady stream of people moving toward the big green canvas tent for the next performance of EPHRAIM, THE ASTOUNDING DOG BOY, THE ONE AND ONLY OF HIS KIND IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.

  I wonder if they have an abundance of astounding dog boys in the Eastern Hemisphere.

  “Dillon,” she hollers again, waving with one hand, pointing at me with the other, this funny-looking, colored straw extension protruding from her index finger, aimed directly at my heart.

  I say, “Hi,” as Christy reaches for the sky like a saloon bartender robbed by the Daltons, and drops to her knees, sliding out of her coat and my grasp. I dive and catch her belt loop an instant before she could have scrambled into the crowd, only to surface at Lost and Found a half hour later stuffed with ice cream and cotton candy to silence her wailing until Mom or I got there. Part of me wants to let her go because though I’m only nine years old, I’m totally, hopelessly, irrevocably in love with Stacy Ryder and I know I could negotiate those mysterious waters better without my pain-in-the-butt sister in the boat. But I am what Mom calls a “trustworthy caretaker,” and besides, Stacy likes you, so I don’t let Christy go. “Nice try, peckerbrains,” I say, lifting her to her feet by the belt and handing her jacket back. “Put this back on. Don’t make me use the leash.”

  Christy’s eyes narrow defiantly, and that impish smile crosses her lips, letting me know that wasn’t her last, or even her best, escape attempt. I don’t know how we were able to keep her in the family, Pres. Seems like she spent her first ten years trying to get away. Maybe she knew something we didn’t.

  “Stick your finger in here,” Stacy says, and I stare at the long orange-and-brown woven straw barrel extending from the end of her finger like a silencer on a handgun.

  “What is it?”

  “Just stick your finger in.”

  I hesitate, squinting. “Is this a trick?”

  She raises her eyebrows, a move I have long been convinced was designed solely to bring me to my knees. “Of course, it’s a trick,” she says. “This is a carnival.”

  I stick my finger in. “Gotcha,” she says. “You can’t get away.”

  This is Stacy Ryder. I don’t want away, but I pull my hand back anyway. The straw tightens around my knuckle. I pull harder.

  “Pull as hard as you want,” she says. “It won’t come off.”

  I do pull harder, yank it, but my finger is caught fast. “What is this thing?” I ask, bringing it, along with Stacy’s hand, closer to my face.

  She says, “Chinese handcuffs. Neat, huh?”

  “Yeah, neat. Do the Chinese use these?”

  “I guess. They’re Chinese handcuffs.”

  “How do I get them off?”

  She shrugs. “You don’t. Once you’re in ’em, you’re in ’em for good. Unless you know the secret.”

  “So what’s the secret?” I ask, at the same moment Christy drops out of the bottom of her jacket again. I reach; but Stacy and the Chinese handcuffs hold me back, and Christy stands just out of reach, hands on her buttocks, eyes squinted, chin stuck out a mile, a pose I’m sure you were as familiar with as I.

  “You’re in trouble now,” she says, and vanishes in a forest of legs.

  I say, “Shit. Lemme out of this, Stace. I gotta get her. God, my mom will kill me if she hears her name over the loudspeaker.”

  Stacy raises her eyebrows again and shrugs. “Sorry. You have to know the secret. The gypsy lady over by the Ferris wheel said it’s a secret of life.”

  “My sister pay you?” I ask. Stacy does know the secret, and I know she knows the secret; but I’m aware there are worse things in life than being connected to Stacy Ryder for the rest of it, and you’re not around to turn her head. And what the hell, Christy is long gone now anyway.

  We wander around together for more than a half hour before Stacy finally shows me the secret, gently holding my hand in place at the wrist while she releases the pressure and slides her finger out; you’ve seen those things, right? Then she just looks at me innocently and shrugs, and I want instantly to lay down my life for her in some heroic and totally selfless way. But Christy has already been bailed out of Lost and Found by Mom, and my name is the one blaring over the loudspeaker every five minutes. Mom is searching furiously for me, intent on grounding me until my thirty-seventh birthday for turning a helpless five-year-old loose in such a dangerous place as the traveling carnival. I paid a lot of dues in my time for that little shit. I’m sure you did, too.

  Anyway, to celebrate my liberation from the ridiculous handcuffs, which can’t have cost more than three cents to make and whose secret of life is lost on me at the time, and to get in as much pleasure as I can before my impending incarceration, I take Stacy for two rides on the octopus and one on the hammer, leaving us nearly too sick to blow the rest of my money on hot dogs and cotton candy. No sense having cash during lifelong confinement. They have to feed you anyway.

  I’m sure I have earlier memories of Stacy, Pres, but that’s the one that always comes first. Being hooked to her and getting free of the handcuffs by releasing, instead of pulling hard. God, if I ever get her straight in my head, well, let’s just say my life could take a turn for the simple. It was easier when you were still here because there was never any doubt who she was with. I grew up. I got bigger, I got stronger, I may have even gotten smarter, but not smart enough to understand the effect she’s always had on me. She may very well have been put on this planet by a sadistic, malevolent God to run my hormones wild and right into a brick wall and to make me feel truckloads of guilt for coveting the one thing my brother had that I wanted.

  Boy, she was in love with you, Pres. She may have liked me better, but she loved you. I hated it. I saw her first. She was in my class at school. She copied off my homework. But she loved you. I tried to reason with her. By the time I was a sophomore and you were a senior, I had about an inch and fifteen pounds on you. That’s when
I started giving her the line about the Duster and the Corvette. That was cheap, Pres. I know it was.

  She teased me back by asking why she should buy more car than she could use, but more or less wasn’t really what it was all about. I don’t want to be unfair or devalue what you guys had, but I think Stacy thought she could save you. I think that was a big part of her love. And I hate to say it, but I’m beginning to see that’s a trick; it happens a lot, I think. Things get misnamed. Look what Mom and Dad called love.

  It’s hard for me to say these things, Preston, with you dead and all because it seems inequitable to pass judgment on your relationship with Stacy when you’re not here to tell me I’m full of shit. But you left, and I’m stuck here to make sense of it, so I’m giving myself some leeway.

  And speaking of your suicide, I haven’t come completely clean to the rest of the world about it. And I don’t know if I will. I even feel strange about writing it down. I’ve read too many stories about little sisters or moms, or whoever, finding diaries hidden in the dresser drawers underneath the underwear or back in the closet behind the shoes, but since there’s no one alive to tell about it, I have to tell it to you just so I can look at it myself. Besides, when Mom hit the road, Christy went with her, and Dad wouldn’t be caught dead in my room.

  See, I might have known. I mean, when we got the guns and headed for the old cemetery, maybe I really knew you were going to do it. And if I did know, well, if I did know, then I’m the one who put the gun in your hands. Literally. Even as messed up as I’d seen you in your life, as broken down and scared and depressed and confused as you were when you first tried to kick the drugs, I’d never seen you like you were the day you shot yourself in the head. If a part of me knew, then another part wanted to let you go ahead. I mean, I wouldn’t have wanted to live your life. The one crazy thing about being your brother and having you look so much like me—or vice versa, I guess you looked this way first—was that sometimes it was like seeing myself with everything off. You may well have been what I’d be were I stripped bare of my sense of humor and my willingness to fight; of my tenacity; even of my legs.

  If my memory’s right, it was the end of your junior year when you bought the Harley. God, I think you still had the first dollar you ever earned hauling groceries for that old woman down the block from us when you were seven. You could have had any bike you wanted with the bundle you had put away. I remember Mom and Dad almost crapped their drawers in parental crisis when you said you were going to get it, but you stood on the family rule that whatever money we kids earned was ours to do with as we pleased. I’ll bet they’d change that one if they had it to do over again. I think it was meant for allowances, not ten-thousand-dollar savings accounts. I remember once he was resigned to the fact that his firstborn son and odds-on favorite to provide him grandchildren before fifty was going to be a biker, Dad tried to talk you into a Honda or Suzuki, because he saw the glaze in your eye every time you said the words Harley-Davidson, but you were dead set on that Sportster. God, and what a monster it was. I never did know much about motorcycles, as hard as you tried to educate me, but I didn’t have to know much to know you were in front of me one second and a long ways down the road the next. And it sounded like you were strafing an airfield when you went by. This was one big, loud bike, my man.

  I think Mom and Dad’s anxiety went down a little after you’d been driving six months or so and your skin was still there to hold your body parts in, instead of laid out like a hairless bear rug on the freeway, but what they didn’t know was you were busy connecting with the Warlocks. And as you well know now, no matter how sharp a bike you’ve got, there’s only one way to hook up with the Warlocks if you’re eighteen years old and 135 pounds, and that is to sell their wares.

  At least they drummed out the jerk who steered you between those two semis. Your “initiation” move, right? God, Pres, you were smarter than that. You were. How bad did you want in with those creeps? You get to be a full member if you pulled off that move? Man, you must have been sky-high. Wolf himself told me you were crazy out of your gourd to follow Indian Red. Bikers may be a few bricks shy of a load sometimes, but they have more respect than that for hard pavement and fast trucks.

  I’ve been thinking about the day you did it, Preston, and I gotta tell you, it rips up my insides, even now, but it also pisses me off so bad that if you hadn’t succeeded, I’d probably have killed you. At least the way I feel today. I remember it like it was yesterday.

  It was a day like few seen in Three Forks in February. At six-thirty in the morning the sky was clear as a bell with the temperature standing at forty degrees Fahrenheit. It would rise to sixty-one, a near record, before the afternoon sun slipped behind Boulder Peak. Winter had been mild, and there was little, if any, snow remaining on the ground. Outside, the light of dawn splashed a single streak of red in the eastern sky, the final evidence of the cloud cover passing over through the night, insulating the earth from the normal late-winter cold.

  Dillon didn’t normally get out of bed at six-thirty on a Saturday morning—in fact, he usually claimed ignorance of the fact that there was a six-thirty on Saturday morning—but on this day his eyes popped open as if by a secret alarm inside his head. He padded over to his bedroom window, pulling on his pajama bottoms, peering at the vague silhouette of Preston’s van parked next to the garage, blocked by the shadow of the house from the early dawnlight. Initially Dillon thought Preston was leaving; but he heard the familiar sound of his wheelchair hitting the concrete, followed by the slam of the van door, and he knew Preston was just coming home. That could only mean trouble. He watched in silence as Preston wheeled himself slowly around the van, touching the hood ornament lightly, running his hand along the pinstriping and the dragon airbrushed onto the side door. Preston performed a couple of figure eights on the concrete driveway, shooting an imaginary ball at the hoop mounted on the backboard above the garage door, then wheeled over to the side of the house, just out of Dillon’s sight. Dillon didn’t know whether to leave him alone or go down and talk—Preston looked really peaceful from that distance—but he opted for the latter, because it all seemed so unusual, and because Preston’s being out that late made him wonder if he’d been somewhere using again.

  “Nice day,” Dillon said from behind him, and Preston started slightly in the chair, not so much from being surprised as being brought back.

  “Yeah.”

  “You just getting in?” Dillon asked.

  “You my mother?”

  No, you asshole, Dillon thought, I’m not your mother. Your mother got sick of this crap and left, remember?, but what he said was “Not the last time I looked.”

  “Then you don’t need to know when I’m getting in.”

  Dillon backed way off. “I didn’t mean to get nosy,” he said. “I was just worried about you, that’s all,” and he turned to walk back into the house. “I just thought . . . Never mind.”

  Preston didn’t respond.

  Dillon knew there were going to be times when Preston was moody. He had refused to enter into any kind of drug treatment program, wanted to see if he could do it on his own first. “Sometimes when I’m hurtin’,” he’d said at the outset, “I feel mean enough to kill, so those are probably good times to let me be.” Dillon and his dad had agreed they would, but Dillon hadn’t realized it would be so difficult. He had a temper, too, and his first reaction to being jumped on was to jump back, hard.

  But on this day he walked back into the house.

  Dillon’s door cracked open like a gunshot two hours later, bringing him out of his bed like a sailor in a fire drill on a nuclear submarine. When his mind caught up, he saw Preston balanced on his back wheels in the bedroom doorway, a big smile plastered across his face. Seeing him like that, Dillon couldn’t recall for certain whether their earlier encounter was real or a dream.

  “Let’s go shoot us some tin cans,” Preston said.

  “Some of my best friends are tin cans.”

/>   “All of your friends are tin cans. Let’s go shoot some.”

  Dillon was aware this was the first time the two had joked around in a long time, maybe years, and he wasn’t about to let it get away. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed as Preston dropped his front wheels back to the floor. “Meet me at the van in five,” Preston said. “I got the shootin’ irons.”

  Dillon was never much with a gun. That was his father’s and Preston’s territory. They were the hunters; he was the gatherer. He knew he’d probably drop a couple of Abe Lincolns or maybe even an Andrew Jackson on bets, as Preston fanned down a row of cans and bottles while his bullets strayed harmlessly into tree trunks and Mother Earth, but any connection was worth it. This was the first hint of anything that felt like family to him for a long, long time. It was only a crumb, but he’d had no idea how much he’d missed it.

  Preston guided the van slowly up Cedar Street as Three Forks began to come alive. They stopped at Jackie’s Home Cookin’ for some pancakes and eggs, and Preston talked about old times—back before times—as he watched people passing by on the sidewalk from his window seat. “Remember when we were little and Dad used to take us on the mail run?” he asked, without waiting for an answer. “We’d come down here for breakfast really early in the morning and listen to the old neighborhood guys talk about shit they didn’t know anything about, only we didn’t know it. God, I think the smell of this place is the best memory I have in the world.” He was quiet a second, and Dillon started to answer, but Preston went on. “Sometimes we’d ask Stacy along and then fight about who she was with, remember?”