by J. Boyett
“Yeah. Yeah.”
They ate in silence a while. Then Jesse said, shyly, “Maybe it’s stupid, but it almost seems like there would be almost good things about being in jail. Like, not good, I don’t mean, but . . . maybe things would at least be clearer. Like, you wouldn’t have all these weird obligations that appear out of nowhere. You’d have to stay alive and try to keep from getting your ass kicked and that’d be it. There wouldn’t be any confusion.” Seeming to suddenly hear herself, she laughed in horror and said, “Oh my God, what a stupid bitch I sound like! I’m sorry.”
Ricky sat there holding his fork over his plate, looking at the table, not sure how to reply. “Prison really sucked,” he said finally.
Jesse sobered. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Of course it did. I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry.”
“No, I am. It was a dumb thing to say. I was letting my, I don’t know, daydreams get away with me, or something.”
“I didn’t mean anything. I just meant—you know—that it was bad.”
Jesse gazed at him a moment longer. Then, as if she were making a decision, or signing something, she reached across the table and put her hand on top of his where it lay on the table. He rotated it so that their palms touched, then closed his fingers over hers.
8.
They talked about regular stuff a while. Like, they talked about their families. Ricky told her about his mom’s transformation. Jesse talked about her mom and dad, whom she’d gone to church with this past weekend. She claimed she’d outgrown their whole religion thing long ago, but still participated in it with them because she felt guilty. Towards the end of their date, Ricky asked Jesse if she knew Ted.
She made a face. “Yeah, I know him. We went to high school together.” It had already come up that Jesse’d gone to high school at Parkview—Ricky and Elly had gone to Little Rock High, and Elly and Jesse had never met each other. Which was weird, because as Jesse and Ricky talked about Elly it became clear that, even in spite of having gone to different schools, the girls’ worlds had intersected everywhere. In terms of guys, at least.
“The cops think he killed Elly.”
Jesse made another face, one that was harder to interpret. “I heard that,” she said. “Are they sure?” Maybe the face meant that she had once had to be kind to Ted, the way she’d had to be kind to Paul yesterday and earlier today, the way she was being kind to Ricky now, and that she couldn’t entirely reverse gears, not all at once.
Ricky said, “No, they’re not sure. Not officially anyway. But they’re looking for him and can’t find him. And Elly said he was a thug. That was one of the last things she ever said to me. What about you? What do you think?”
Jesse paused. He could see her really, actually going over it in her mind. Then she nodded and said, “Yeah, he probably did it.” They were both quiet a second, then she added, “Isn’t that always the first suspect anyway? The boyfriend?”
“Especially when the boyfriend beats her up and bruises her face.”
“Did he do that? I didn’t know.”
“Yeah. Is that a surprise? Like, to you, to someone who knows him?”
She shrugged. “No.”
They changed the subject to something more date-appropriate, but before long it drifted back to Ted again. “I don’t guess you have any idea where he could be?” asked Ricky.
She looked at him like he was crazy. “Of course not,” she said.
“No, I don’t mean like that, like you’re keeping a secret. I just meant, like, maybe you might know places he hangs out, stuff like that. Stuff the cops wouldn’t necessarily know.”
“I don’t know any more than anyone else. And I think he just went to all the usual places. Except I think I remember that he used to hang out at that skeezy Joe Bear’s place. I guess maybe he still does. Except, I mean, if he knows the cops are looking for him then maybe he’s not hanging out anywhere.”
“Where did you say? Some kind of Bears place?”
“It’s French,” she said, and spelled it for him: Jaubert’s. “It’s this creepy place out by Kanis Park, on Asher. I’ve never been in there.”
“Did he go there really often?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Probably not as often as he hung out at Vino’s and Juanita’s and all the regular places. I just always remember it because he’s the only one I ever heard of going there.”
“Why’s it creepy?”
“Because it just looks like it is. Like the kind of place where there are fights. Also Paul told me that he would drag Elly there and the whole vibe really freaked her out.”
Ricky thought it over. “You think they might have any idea where Ted might be?”
“The people who hang out at Jaubert’s? I don’t know why they would.”
“Might be a good place to start, though. For someone that was trying to find the guy.”
“I guess. Mention it to the cops, maybe.”
He drove her home, getting more and more agitated over whether or not he should kiss her and, if so, how he should choreograph it. It turned out to be a moot point, since she hopped out of the car as soon as he pulled up to her front yard, though she did stand just outside the car and wave at him. “Okay, thanks,” she said, “I had a nice time. Thanks for buying me lunch.”
Ricky set off towards Kanis Park. He turned the radio on, to kill the quiet. Then he spent the rest of the drive flipping through the stations. Sometimes there’d be something decent playing, good enough for him to sing along in snatches, but he always compulsively switched to see what was playing elsewhere.
The worst thing that had ever happened to him in jail, which hadn’t actually happened (or, he supposed, the worst thing that had ever almost happened to him): there’d been this one guy, Larry, this super-effeminate older guy who’d been in for five years and who most everybody fucked with. He was always nice to Ricky, and Ricky was nice to him. In the yard one day Bernard, this meaty smooth-scalped redneck with swastika tattoos, had been taunting Larry for the benefit of his jeering posse, describing all the shit he was going to do to him while Larry trembled and, trying to smile ingratiatingly, kept repeating, “Okay, well, you’re in charge, so, you know, if you decide to do that, if you decide to do that, Bernard, there’s no way I can stop you.”
Ricky stood there, almost but not quite in the small circle of onlookers. He knew he ought to do something, but couldn’t visualize the action he was supposed to be bringing into existence. The chance to fulfill some requirement was definitely slipping away, though. He forced himself to say something, but all that came out was “Hey.”
He’d said it in a calm tone, at a casual, conversational volume. But Bernard reacted like Ricky had shouted. He snapped around, glared at Ricky with excited outrage. “You sticking up for this faggot?” he said.
Ricky blinked. He felt scared, but it was more like stage fright than fear of physical danger. “I, just, you know,” he said.
“What did you say?! I know what?!”
“Just, you know.”
“Do you want to know something? I’m going to fuck you, you faggot.” Cheers from Bernard’s friends. “Me and my boys are going to hold you down in the showers and take turns ripping your asshole out.”
Bernard waited. Ricky just kind of looked at him in the middle of all those guys, hooting and hollering.
“Well?” said Bernard finally. “You got something to say about that, faggot?”
Ricky opened his mouth and shut it. He shrugged, self-conscious.
Bernard didn’t even bother to make fun of him not being able to talk. He just pointed at him and said, “I’m going to rape you, faggot.” Then it was time to go in, and the laughing crowd dispersed.
After that, in the showers, Ricky would clench himself even more tightly than before. And when Bernard and his friends were in there with him, he felt so freaked out that it was like it was already happening. Bernard and his skinhead buddies would murmur and whisper to each other, and the
n burst out laughing. There was no proof they were talking about Ricky—even the malicious edge in their voices didn’t necessarily mean much—but it fucked with the rhythm of Ricky’s heartbeat even so.
But the thing was that nothing ever happened. Ricky spent hundreds of hours wondering how he would react, figuring out what he would do to resist and how he would live with himself after that resistance inevitably failed. But all that work of psyching himself up proved to be for nothing. Even after Bernard got paroled, Ricky assumed that he had deputized some of his cronies to someday fuck Ricky up, and he stayed ready for something to happen. But nothing ever did. Not that he was complaining. Obviously, he was relieved that the threat had never come true, and that he hadn’t had to deal with it in any way.
He’d tried a few times to write a real letter to Elly, one where he told her about the thing with Bernard, even though he knew it would be irresponsible to tell her stuff that would make her worry. But what made it impossible to get down a draft was that nothing had really happened. Ricky dimly understood that even less happened in those letters of Elly’s that he found so fascinating—but he couldn’t make whatever leap it was that allowed one to impart significance to some particular span of time.
As he drove he had to remind himself not to daydream too much and to pay attention to the other cars. It wasn’t that long of a drive, so he barely had enough time to cycle through all the radio stations twice before he was at Jaubert’s.
He sat out in front of the bar for a while, listening to the engine click and to the soft roar of traffic. Jaubert’s was a dingy little place. How had he never noticed it before? It was right out here, facing a major street. Its sign looked like it had been up for years and years, Ricky probably really had ridden or driven past it a thousand times. It was part of a tiny strip mall, whose other stores were vacant. The tall trees of Kanis Park were just down the road. Ricky had dim childhood memories of its playground, plus he’d taken Elly there not long before he’d gone to jail. She’d been the youngest kid at the skate bowl, practically a little girl. He remembered how she’d eye him almost fearfully, waiting for cues on how to act. It had made him feel proud in a manful way, taking care of her like that.
He remembered things about Elly. Now he was used to thinking of her as a grown woman, but for so many years she had been so much littler than him, and it had seemed that was the way it would always be. She’d always wanted to tag along after him, and he’d put her off, in his big-brother way. Sometimes they’d strike deals, she’d do stuff in exchange for his grown-up company. Kid stuff, mainly.
And sometimes they’d played games. Like there had been this one time when for a whole month they’d pretended that one of the neighborhood gangstas was planning to snatch Elly and have his way with her, and that Ricky was protecting her. Even though they’d been pretending they’d still believed it, like how when you’re just waking up and you know you’re in your bed but you’re still panicked about your dream.
That was the kind of game she’d played in her letters, only she’d known how to hide the game in a grown-up way. He’d never been able to do it when he’d written back, never been able to do it in writing. Only in person, and now with Elly gone who would he play with?
There were three pick-up trucks in front of Jaubert’s, and even through the tinted glass and between the slats of the opened blinds, Ricky could see people at the bar, big guys, moving around. It certainly wasn’t like the place was hidden, and Ricky felt vaguely hurt that no one had ever pointed it out to him before.
He got out of the car and went in, locking his door behind him.
There were three guys hanging out at the bar, plus the bartender, and all of them looked up mildly at Ricky. They were sort of good old boys. “How you doing?” asked the bartender.
“Fine,” said Ricky, and sat on a barstool and asked for a Bud. The bartender handed it to him in a glass mug and Ricky paid. After he took a sip, he got up and went to the bathroom. The guys watched him go.
The weathered wallpaper in the hall outside the bathroom had pictures of cute little bears doing acrobatics. They reminded Ricky of Care Bears. It was weird, seeing pictures like that in a bar like this. He went into the dirty men’s room and made himself piss—it was easy, since he’d had that Coke at Ruby Tuesday. Then he looked at himself a long time in the spotted mirror, taking deep breaths, then went back to the bar.
He took his stool again and nodded at the bartender, who nodded back and said “Hey, there.”
Ricky nodded yet again and said “Hey,” and sipped at his beer. He kind of missed the fancy Sam Adams Elly had given him the other day, and the microbrewery stuff from Vino’s, with its odd spices and accents.
“I haven’t been in here before,” said Ricky.
The bartender shrugged.
Ricky said, “I think a guy I know comes here a lot, though. This guy Ted? He has curly black hair?”
“Yeah, Ted comes around.”
“He comes with that girl he’s dating, I think.”
“Yeah, he brought her here a couple times.”
“Did they, like, get along?” asked Ricky.
“What?”
“Like, did they get along?”
“How should I know?”
Ricky turned and asked the other two guys at the bar if they knew Ted. They were having a private conversation, so Ricky had to ask them twice. One drinker said to his buddy, by way of explanation, “Ted’s the one with the stuck-up bitch girlfriend.”
Ricky’s head was like a conch with the sea in it. “That so?” he said. “How come you say that?”
“Because it’s true. Ask anybody.” The drinker gestured towards the bartender. “Ask him.”
The bartender shrugged and said, “Total bitch.”
“That so,” said Ricky. “What’d she do that was so bitchy?”
But the drinkers rolled their eyes, annoyed at Ricky for not catching on that the game wasn’t fun, and returned to their conversation.
To the bartender, Ricky said, “You got any idea where I might be able to find him?”
“Why would I?”
“I’m just trying to find him. To warn him that people are out looking for him. See, somebody killed his girlfriend.”
“Good,” said the drinker who’d called Elly a bitch, and he and his buddy laughed. Ricky took another swallow of his beer, holding tightly onto the mug’s handle.
The bartender said, “Hey now,” and to Ricky, “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Well if you could think of anyplace he might be I would really appreciate it. Because I’d really like to see the guy.”
The other guys at the bar were smirking dangerously at Ricky by now. “Why?” said the bartender. “You friends with Ted, you said?”
“Yeah, I’m friends with him. But I haven’t seen him in a long time and I don’t know much about his girlfriend.”
“Who gives a shit?” said the drinker who hadn’t spoken yet, and who seemed the drunkest. “Who cares if you ‘know about his girlfriend’?”
“Well, because somebody stabbed her to death, and the natural person for them to think of is Ted.”
“Good,” repeated the first drinker, and he and his buddy laughed again.
Ricky took a bigger drink from his mug and said, “I guess I just want to get hold of him to let him know that the cops’re looking for him.”
“The cops’re looking for him, huh,” said the bartender.
The drunker guy said, “Shit, I’ll testify about that cunt bitch if anyone wants to ask, I’ll say she had it coming.”
Ricky took another swallow of his Bud and set the mug back down on the bar. “I don’t guess anybody here knows where Ted’s at?” he asked. “Because there’re all these people looking for him, and I’d like to let him know that.”
The bartender was scowling now. “Hey, man, Ted’s just a guy who comes in here sometimes. His girlfriend came with him twice and one time she made a scene. Whatever happened is
none of my business, and it’s none of yours, so how about you change the subject and finish your beer.”
As a matter of fact Ricky was draining the last of his beer as the bartender spoke, and as his reply he brought the mug smashing down on the bar, sending glass shards rocketing everywhere and leaving in his grip the handle that ended now in two spikes of broken glass. The shards hit the other guys, leaving red nicks in the faces of the guy next to him and the bartender. Just under the bartender’s eye a little red spot pooled. “It’s my business because it’s my sister, asshole,” Ricky said.
The bartender stared at him like he was crazy. “Who’s your sister,” he said. The shock that was thawing in enough of the area around his mouth to let him speak seemed to have not yet unfrozen in the rest of his body.
“Ted’s fucking girlfriend,” said Ricky.
No one said anything. The bar was quiet, except for the Garth Brooks song playing.
The two drinkers sidled glances at each other. Ricky waited for one of them to make a move, his glass handle gripped tight.
The bartender, though, relaxed his body. “Shit,” he said, and brought his finger up to gingerly touch the bloody spot on his face. He looked at the little speck of blood on his fingertip, then back up at Ricky. “I didn’t know she was your sister, man.”
“Well, she was. Now tell me about Ted.”
“I don’t know where Ted is, man.”
Ricky continued to hold himself ready for a brawl, as if he might need to stick someone with that broken mug. The more time passed without anyone making an aggressive move, though, the sillier he felt. Besides, the mug handle did not really end in two jagged glass spikes; they were pretty clean breaks, and the ends of the handles were almost completely flat and smooth. He said, “So tell me about when he came in with Elly.”
“They just came in and had some beers, man.”
Ricky waved the mug handle at him. “You better do better than that,” he said.