by J. Boyett
Ricky came inside and locked the door behind him. “I just wasn’t sure,” he said.
“Wasn’t sure about what?”
“Whether you heard me.”
“I just told you I did.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t sure.”
“Well now you know.”Ricky sat down on the couch next to her. He looked at the side of her face—she kept looking straight at the TV, even though it was a commercial break. The commercials were so loud it was hard for them to hear each other. His mom’s eyes were red, her mouth was tight and wrinkly, she looked a lot older than she had the other day when he’d been released. “How are you?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said.
“Really?” he said, surprised.
His mom sighed. She said, “I’m just watching some TV. To relax.”
Ricky nodded. He tried to keep looking at his mom’s face, but there was a beer commercial on that was kind of distracting. He said, “I was just thinking earlier about how it’s like I don’t know any of the shows.”
His mom just looked at the screen and didn’t say anything.
“Because of being in jail,” he supplied.
“It’s not like they didn’t have TV in jail,” his mom snapped.
“No, yeah, that’s true,” he said. He nodded. “That’s true.” There was an empty Family-Size Doritos bag on the floor and a couple of jumbo M & M’s bags.
The show was coming back on, so they quit talking. Ricky watched it. This one didn’t have any laugh tracks, it was a courtroom thing. Someone had killed somebody, they were trying to figure out who did it.
Ricky watched the show, dutifully piecing together what was going on. But sitting there just watching TV with his mom and not saying anything even though Elly was dead felt even weirder and more humiliating than quietly watching TV with Jesse even though they’d just made out had. There was an interrogation scene on the TV. He said, “So did that guy actually do it?”
“I don’t know. The show’s not over yet.”
“Oh. . . . So you don’t find out till the end. . . .”
Ricky tried to concentrate on the carpet or his shoes but his interest got sucked in again. The scene was really dramatic, he really couldn’t help but wonder how it was going to end. Trying to shake off its hold on his attention, he asked his mom, “So, did the cops come around to ask anything?”
Again, his mother sighed. “Ricky, I need to relax and not think about all that. Okay? Now please just let me watch my show!”
“Oh, okay,” said Ricky. He returned his attention to the TV and watched the show with his mom, being supportive. Her snapping at him had the same shock of the familiar as driving through Little Rock and recognizing the old landmarks that must have always been living in his mind, unnoticed. He remembered her old stoned and drunken freak-outs, the way she’d always clumsily tried to hide the weed from him and Elly; in the beginning Elly really had been too young to recognize what it was. This was just like that, except that it was weird because then, she’d been in her fat body, but now she was in her new thin skin-sagging one. Also, it was weird because those old freak-outs were muffled in the past, but this one was really happening now. Not that she was actually freaking out. He shouldn’t overreact.
At the next commercial break he felt like he ought to try again. He said, “You know, they arrested that guy Ted.”
His mom didn’t say anything. He could sort of feel it that she’d heard him, though.
After a few seconds he added, “I saw them doing it, actually.”
There was still a little wait. Then his mom said, “Well, that’s good.”
“Yeah. It is.” He watched the commercial a while. It was for soap. Then he said, “Except, it’s not like we know for sure he did it.”
“Who else would it be?”
“A robber. Or some other ex-boyfriend. Actually, anyone could have done it.” His mom didn’t say anything. Ricky tried her again: “I mean, just because the cops want to decide that Ted did it, that doesn’t mean we have to go along with it. We can make up our minds about whoever we want. . . .”
His mom interrupted him: “I don’t care.” She was still looking at the TV even though it was still a commercial. “Is it going to bring Elly back? No. So fuck it, then, I don’t care.”
“No, I know.”
“I haven’t been thinking about anything but this for two days, Ricky! Now can we not just drop it and let me watch TV?!”
“No, no, no, yeah, that’s fine.” He looked at the carpet some. “It’s just that it’s weird that they didn’t talk to us about it or anything.”
“Why would they talk to us?” his mom asked bitterly.
“Well, just, you’d think they would question us.”
“Why?”
“In case we might know something.”
“We don’t know anything.”
“But they don’t know that. We might.”
“This isn’t a TV show, Ricky, it’s real life. We’re not going to know anything.”
“No. I know.”
They watched TV a while. Ricky actually wouldn’t have minded just continuing to watch it. But he felt his mom sitting next to him, like a dense bomb.
He sat there for a while and didn’t do anything. Then he rubbed his palms on his jeans, to dry them, then said, “All right, well, I’m going to go out for a little while.”
“All right,” said his mom, looking at the television.
Ricky started shifting his weight around, getting ready to stand up. “Do you need anything?”
For a few seconds his mom didn’t say anything. Then, sounding very tired, she said, “I just need to be left alone, Ricky. That’s all.”
“No, yeah, sure.” He stood up and looked down at his mom. Now, even though the show was back on, she did look back at him, her loaded vibrating eyes flickering up at his. “Goodbye, Mom,” he said.
“Goodbye, Ricky,” she said, a little quieter than she had been before.
In the car he thought about the people he’d dealt with these last couple days. He got a warm feeling from Jesse, though it was a tenuous, diffused warmth. It was hard to argue with his mom for not wanting him around. Elly was dead. They’d already gone ahead and arrested Ted. He thought about the weird way Paul had touched the back of his neck at Paul’s apartment, about his strange affection and brightness. It struck him as disrespectful somehow.
It seemed to him that something had come to him in a dream about Paul, and he tried to remember what it had been. The information had to still be there in his head, if he concentrated he should be able to find it. He didn’t believe in, like, supernatural visions and stuff; but on TV, in shows and on the news both, you sometimes heard about people subconsciously figuring stuff out, picking up on subliminal clues that they put together in, say, their sleep. The more he gnawed on the shadow of the memory, the more he realized that he had had some revelation about Paul, right after Elly had died. He couldn’t remember what the dream had been—but how many things could it possibly be? Only one or two seemed like obvious choices to Ricky’s imagination.
Ricky drove to Vino’s. When he got there Jesse was sitting alone with a beer—she must have finished her shift. When she saw Ricky come in her eyes got big, and when he sat down with her she sort of leaned away. She didn’t seem able to respond when he questioned her, and so he had to ask twice: “Do you know where Paul is?”
Jesse shrugged, not looking straight at him but not wanting to take her eyes off him, either. “Just setting up,” she said. “They’ll play soon.”
Ricky was bouncing in the chair. He wished he hadn’t sat down. “Ted’s been arrested,” he said.
“Oh, wow,” she said, but not very excitedly.
“You aren’t surprised?”
She looked at him, as if warily checking something out real quick, then immediately looked back at her beer. “Well,” she said, “no, not really. Because you told me the cops were looking for him. And everybody kind of figured
that maybe he did it. I mean, it’s not like we know for sure he did it. But of course the police would want to at least question him.”
“It just seems a little suspicious, how easy it was for the cops to find him.”
“Where was he?”
“At his house.”
Jesse actually laughed, which made it seem like she was in a good mood. She said, “Well, that doesn’t sound suspicious. I mean, why wouldn’t they check there?”
Ricky looked at the beer she was holding and wished he had one too, so as to have something to do with his hands. “I just have a bad feeling about it,” he said.
“What kind of feeling?”
“Just, a bad one.” He definitely wished he hadn’t sat down. “It just feels too convenient. Like, that the first person they went looking for would be the guy who actually did it. I think they’re just settling, because they’re too lazy to keep, like, digging.”
“But Ted used to beat her up, and he’s kind of nuts. And, I mean, they must have checked for, like, physical evidence and stuff.”
Getting impatient, Ricky said, “Look, I’m not saying he’s definitely the wrong guy.” Frustrated, he looked around, and said, “Look, can we get out of here?”
Jesse kept looking at her beer, or else sort of towards Ricky’s forearm. “No,” she said. “I’d rather just hang out here.”
“Come on. What do you mean, no?”
“I just, Paul’s playing later and I told him I’d watch. And I kind of want to hang out here with my friends.”
“But I’m talking to you about Elly.”
Jesse winced. “I know,” she moaned. “I know, you’re right—I really ought to be. . . . I mean, can’t we just talk about it here?”
“Here? No!” Then it occurred to him that she didn’t already know what he was going to say, and after that he cooled down some: “I actually sort of want to talk to you about someone. Who’s here. So it would be weird to do the talking here.”
“Well, I kind of need some time with my friends. I mean, we’ve already talked about Elly and all that.”
Ricky felt pressure in his head, like it was a blood balloon being steadily filled and ready to burst. “So, what, I’m supposed to just forget about it?” he demanded. “I mean, the funeral isn’t even till the day after tomorrow.”
Jesse lowered her head like she was ashamed—well, Ricky thought, she should be ashamed. Besides, Ricky figured that was a good thing, because it would help him get her to go out to the car with him, which he needed her to do. Also it was almost like she was scared. “Please,” he said. “Please.” Then his joints got loose while his muscles and throat got hard, and he started to cry a little.
“Oh,” said Jesse, like she was in despair. She touched him. “No, no, please don’t cry, Ricky.”
Ricky wiped his face and left his hand there to hide it, furious at Jesse for making him have to cry just to get her to come with him. “Won’t you just come with me? I mean, my sister’s dead!”
Jesse gave up. She spend a few seconds gathering strength, and looked at her beer like she was thinking of downing the whole thing, but in the end accepted that she was going to have to leave that, too. “Let’s go,” she said, and stood up. From the back room, where the band was, could be heard the clanking chords of the guitars as they began their sound check.
Outside the sky was turning that deep brief blue. They picked their way across the treacherous parking lot. When they got to his mom’s car Ricky started to unlock the driver’s side door, then remembered to be a gentleman and ran around and unlocked Jesse’s first.
The car bounced them around as they left the pitted lot. They rode in silence until Jesse asked, meekly yet accusingly, “So what did you want to talk about?”
“I need to think for a minute,” said Ricky, and pulled onto the freeway.
There was the crunching purr of the engine, the hum of other traffic around them, the steady noise of the madly spinning wheels on the asphalt inches below their feet, like the sound of a giant steady wave that would never crest nor fall. They passed the minor-league baseball stadium on their right, shuttered now and waiting to be demolished. Amazing, to think that it could disappear after having always been there, a piece of eternity slipping down and away into nothingness. Although Ricky supposed that actually it had only been there since the sixties.
Jesse’s fingers curled around her armrest. “Um,” she said. “Could we slow down?”
Ricky noticed that in fact he was going pretty fast. He did slow down. The car was humming its way across town into west Little Rock. Rising through the trees and slipping back in as they passed them were the occasional big building or shopping center. He saw that he was speeding again. But this time Jesse didn’t say anything, and he didn’t bother to slow down.
He pulled off the exit at the end of 6-30, following the curve too fast onto the regular road. Jesse gripped her handle again and said, “Where are we going?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Okay, but where are we going?”
“I’m thinking about where to go.”
“Oh.”
It was all different back here now, this whole part of town had been seriously built up since he’d gone away. The road he was on had once been just a county highway, and now it was a four-lane road, the asphalt was a fresher blue, the lines had been repainted recently. The trees remained, for the moment. But whereas when he was a boy he would have believed those trees were real woods, now he knew that they were only a cosmetic wall of vegetation dividing this road from another.
He tried to weigh the wisdom of what he was going to do, then gave up. Just take the plunge, he advised himself. “I have to confess something,” he said. “I haven’t been totally honest with you.”
“Oh, yeah?” said Jesse, sounding unthrilled.
“Yeah. Can I trust you with something?”
“Um, maybe if it’s a really important secret you shouldn’t tell anyone, though.”
“Well, but I have to tell someone. I need someone to know. I told Elly. But then she. . . .” He trailed off.
There was defeated resignation in her voice when she replied: “Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“Well, I, you know, I told you that I was just the driver. For those guys, when I got sent to jail. But I guess the truth is I had more to do with it than that. I guess the truth is that I shot one of the guys, too.”
“You mean you were in jail for murder?” she asked, confused, her voice trembling.
“No. But that’s because the cops didn’t figure it out. I told them I was only the driver. And everyone else was dead so there was nobody left to say different.”
Now she sounded more confused, less trembling: “But wouldn’t they have tested your hands for gunpowder?”
“Well, they did. But I washed my hands.”
“But what about your clothes? Didn’t it get on your clothes? And I didn’t think you could just, like, wash it off with hand soap. Isn’t it a bigger deal than that?”
“I guess I just got lucky,” Ricky snapped. “I mean, what, you think I’m just making this shit up? Why the fuck would I do that? Do you think I’m fucking crazy?”
Jesse settled quietly against the door, hugging herself and leaning her forehead against the window. Apparently her desire to keep from riling Ricky outweighed whatever concerns she might have felt about discrepancies in his story, since she didn’t pursue the topic further.
Except that after a few seconds, she did ask, “Was that what you wanted to talk about?”
“What? Oh. No. Something else, mainly.”
“Well. So what else did you want to talk about?”
“Just Ted,” Ricky answered, “and whether he really killed Elly. I don’t know, I have a bad feeling about it. Like maybe he wasn’t even the one who did it.”
“But how would you know, one way or the other?”
“It’s just a feeling. Like, a hunch. Haven’t you ever had a hunch?”
“No.”
Ricky had made a turn onto a new road cut through the woods so that now they were heading back the way they’d come. Coming up on the left he could feel a big gap in the darkening trees, and then they were alongside a huge new shopping center, totally deserted except for a couple of sleeping construction machines, no cars in the parking lot and no signs yet on the stores. Ricky turned left and sent the car down the slope of the driveway into the lot, not braking enough and so sending Jesse swinging into the side of her door. He drove to the front of the shopping center and turned left again and drove alongside it, intending to make a circuit of the whole huge parking lot. “It was just,” he said, “I saw Ted.”
“When did you see him?”
“I saw him get arrested.” He looked over at her suspiciously. “Didn’t I tell you that?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember for sure. I think you just told me that he’d been arrested.” Weirdly, she didn’t then ask him how he’d come to be there while Ted was getting arrested. “Well, if they arrested him then they must have had some evidence,” she said. “Or maybe they weren’t even arresting him, really, maybe they just wanted to ask him some questions about stuff.”
“No, they were arresting him, they had like cuffs on him.”
“Okay, well, I don’t know,” said Jesse, almost wailing, “how am I supposed to know? If they arrested him then probably they have fingerprints or DNA or witnesses or something.”
“But no, you’re not listening to me,” said Ricky, and he stopped driving along the perimeter of the parking lot and veered into its interior, where he started driving in big circles, the centrifugal force pressing him into his door and pushing Jesse his way.
“I’m trying to listen,” she said, her voice getting teary. “But I don’t understand. I mean, you saw him. Okay! You saw him?”
“I just, I saw him, and, I mean, I know him! I know this guy! You know what I mean? I just get this sense, like, ‘I know this guy. This guy’s like me.’ He’s exactly like me. I had this deep, like, empathy with him all of a sudden. And I could just see in his face that he hadn’t done it. You know? Do you see what I’m saying?”