by J. Boyett
“No.”
“But, take somebody like Paul—I look into his face, and it’s completely different.”
“Paul?”
Ricky began putting on the brake and the car slowly came to a stop. He put the car into park and turned to face Jesse, putting his arm around the back of the seat. “I mean, why couldn’t it have been Paul?” he asked, reasonably.
“Why could it have been Paul?! They’re totally different people! And Ted was the one who was dating her!”
“But Paul was the one she’d dumped. So he had more of a motive.”
“That’s crazy! You saw how Paul was the other day after Elly died. We were both there. You saw him, the way he was crying.”
“People can have lots of reasons for crying,” Ricky said savagely.
“Ricky. Please. You’re scaring me. And I don’t understand what you’re saying. What is it you’re saying, about Paul?”
“Just, that feeling that I got, when I looked at Ted, that feeling like I knew the guy. It’s the opposite when I look at Paul. It’s like, when he talks about Elly, and about Ted, it’s almost like he’s actually talking about something else. Like he’s trying to put me off the trail. Like there’s something fake.”
“What are you talking about?”
“All his talk about how I should just leave all this stuff alone. How I should let the cops handle everything. It’s like he doesn’t want me poking around!”
“Ricky, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ricky gave up. He slumped in his seat. He was exhausted. Then he held out his arms towards Jesse and said, “Would you just hold me for a while?”
Jesse leaned back against her door. “No,” she said.
Roaring filled his ears and microscopic bubbles started popping under his skin. “What?” he wailed. “I’m just asking you to hold me!”
“No, Ricky,” she said. Her voice was shaky. “Take me back to Vino’s, please. I want to see my friends.”
He kept staring at her in disbelief and horror. “But I’m only asking you to hold me!” he protested again. “And anyway, aren’t I your friend? Aren’t I kind of like your boyfriend?”
Her whole body was shaking. “No,” she said, “you’re not my boyfriend, we’re not dating, Ricky.”
“Well then why did you fuck me if we’re not dating?”
Jesse was blinking faster and faster. “I wanted to help you,” she said, keeping control of her voice. “I wanted to just talk to you. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do, is help people.”
“But that’s what I’m asking, is for you to help me.”
“I can’t help you anymore.” She whimpered, and said, “I’m sorry, but I think maybe you should go to a doctor, Ricky.”
He shook his head in disbelief, then, after looking out the windshield for a moment, recovered himself. He turned back to Jesse and said, “Look, just hold me for a second.”
“No, Ricky!”
“God damn it!” he said, and grabbed her arm and yanked her towards him—grabbing her shoulder with his other hand, he smashed their faces together. But she broke free and slapped at him with her left hand, and even though the blows were pretty lame they shocked him enough to where he warded them off, and that meant he let go of her shoulder and she was able to scramble for the door and unlock it, and open it and try to jump out. But he still had a grip on her wrist and so she hung suspended halfway out of the car, tugging on her own arm. “Let me go!” she shouted. “Let me go!”
“No, hey, shhh,” said Ricky. “Hey, listen. Just calm down. Okay?”
“Fuck you!” she shouted. “Let me go!”
“Jesse,” Ricky said, very sad. He was afraid that she must be hurting her arm, pulling on it like that. “Please come back inside. I can’t drive away and leave you here, there’s nowhere to go.”
There were tears on her face, but she wasn’t struggling as hard anymore. She said, “Let me go.”
“I will,” he said, soothingly. “Just come back in the car. I’ll take you back to Vino’s, and I won’t bother you anymore.”
Now she wasn’t struggling anymore at all; she was just hanging halfway out of the car by her arm. “I’m sick of all you guys,” she sobbed. “I’m just so sick of all you fucking guys.”
He made soft shushing noises at her, and said, “I know you are. I’m sorry. Come back in the car, Jesse. I’ll take you back there, and I’ll try not to bother you again.”
For a little bit she kept hanging there and crying. Finally she scooted all the way back onto the seat and closed and locked the door after her, still sniffling. Maybe she’d quit fighting because her arm had finally started to hurt too much.
Now it was dark. During the drive they didn’t say anything for a long while. Jesse got her sniffling under control and was quiet. She kept rubbing her wrist and elbow.
When they were almost halfway back Ricky said, “I think I just need to see him.”
Jesse didn’t say anything.
“I feel like, if I can look him in the face and just confront him with what I think, then one way or another I’ll know. You know? Because I’ll just get a sense of it.”
Jesse still didn’t reply.
That calm that had come over him when he’d seen how he’d scared Jesse was wearing off, and he didn’t fight its leaving. Instead he let his anger build its steam back up. “I mean,” he said, “because I really think that motherfucker killed my sister!”
Jesse’s mouth opened like she thought she was supposed to say something, but then her jaw just hung there like she didn’t know what it was.
But then, as they got closer to Vino’s, she did speak, like remaining silent would make her responsible for something she didn’t want to be responsible for. “So,” she said, gingerly; “what’re you going to do?”
Ricky didn’t say anything.
“Are you going to call the cops?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Not that you shouldn’t, if you think that’s the right thing to do. I just meant, if you didn’t want to do it yourself, if you didn’t feel up to it, then. . . .”
Maybe she’d been about to make the offer out of habit, because she was used to offering to do things, but then, when she’d gotten right up close to the words and realized what they were, she couldn’t actually say them and had to stop talking for lack of anything else to say.
A few seconds went by. Then she asked, “So what’re you going to do when we get to Vino’s?”
Ricky didn’t answer. They were only a block away, anyway.
The headlights swept a tunnel of light through the crumbled parking lot before them, illuminating Paul as he slouched by with his guitar on his back, cutting across the lot on his way home. Ricky put the parking brake on, popped open his door and hopped out of the car, hearing behind him Jesse’s impotent moan.
Paul had stopped walking and was staring at him, his face slack. He looked like he was trying to think of something appropriate to say.
“Did you kill my sister?” demanded Ricky.
Paul shook his head, but not like he was denying it, more like he wanted to signal that he hadn’t expected the question to be asked yet, or to be asked as if it were a vulgar yes-no kind of deal. Ricky grabbed fistfuls of Paul’s T-shirt and yanked him forward, head-butting him and feeling Paul’s nose break. Paul tottered backwards, Ricky pushed him and he toppled, landing on his guitar with a crunching sound. In Ricky’s head the crunching sound the guitar made got mixed up with the as-yet imagined noises of Paul’s body breaking, and he felt run-through with the unbearable high tension of skating so close to annihilation.
Paul was on his back like a turtle. People, still fuzzy and peripheral, were running up and yelling. He heard Jesse screaming behind him. Later he wouldn’t be able to remember whether it had been his name or Paul’s.
Ricky sat on Paul’s stomach and pounded his face. He grabbed him by the hair and slammed the back of his head into the asphalt. People
had gathered around them, but all Paul’s friends seemed too pussy to try to pull Ricky off. “You killed my sister!” Ricky shouted. “You fucking killed my sister, you asshole!”
Paul was just blubbering and not even trying to fight. He croaked something through mucous and his hamburger lips.
Ricky was crying. There was a smell. He put his hands on Paul’s shoulders, on either side of his neck, like he’d start choking him once he caught his breath. Behind him he heard Jesse weeping.
Paul kept trying to croak words. They could have been “I fucked up, I fucked up.”
Ricky squeezed his shoulders. He said, “Me, too.”
Behind him Jesse laid her long cool palm flat between his shoulder blades. It took him a while to figure out what it was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much gratitude to my editor, Carl Robert Anderson. Thank you, Mary Sheridan. Thanks to my parents, and to my brother Chris. Muchas gracias to Mike Lindgren, not merely for the innumerable bacon chili cheeseburgers and boundless buckets of beer. To Ron Kolm, too. Nick Rowan and Emilie Lemakis graciously provided the cover image.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. Boyett can be reached at [email protected]