“What mall? Only mall near here is down in Manchester and that’s over an hour away.”
“Yeah, and if you tell Mom, I’ll tell her about the time I caught you and Mervyn trying on her underwear.”
I smiled. She was trying to play hardball but she wasn’t very good at it. Fact was, despite my run-in with the law, my parents trusted me more than they trusted her. Stealing lawn ornaments was one thing, but getting caught smoking dope in the attic with your friend was another. And she was, naturally, the offender of the second.
“That never happened,” I replied, juggling the dice now, “and even if you make up some stupid shit to get me in trouble, it’ll never work. Mom doesn’t trust you anymore.”
“Oh, yeah—”
“Why don’t you go pop that huge zit on your nose?” I knew that would piss her off. She had perfect skin, but her crazy teenage vanity turned every tiny bump into Mount Olympus.
“Fuck you,” she screamed, and with that, stormed out.
I sat at the table with my eggs and rolled the dice as I ate. Outside, the sun was high and the air coming through the window smelled of cut grass and pine needles and baking dirt. A murder of crows flew from a tree in the woods out back and sat on the power lines over the driveway.
“I want to go shoot my 9mm today,” Tooth said.
“Dude, how many guns do you have?”
“Just two. I would have got them long ago if it wasn’t for you always worrying what your mom would say. But you looked pretty happy shooting that .44. Gave you a hard on, didn’t it? I told you it would.”
I didn’t want to let on how much firing the gun had affected me, but it had certainly turned my nuts into giant Epcot Centers of steel. The sense of power was unfathomable; suddenly I was the mightiest thing in existence, all men bowing before me. With the squeeze of a finger I could undo all of God’s creations. Truthfully, I couldn’t wait to try the 9mm.
I rolled the dice; they came up seven, a lucky number if ever there was one.
“Okay,” I said. “But let’s go somewhere different. I didn’t like being so close to the road at that other spot. And besides, you and I still go there so maybe other people do too and I don’t want to shoot some fucking dude traipsing through the woods on his way to down some suds.”
“Fair enough.”
Just then the phone rang. Tooth leapt up and grabbed it, said, “Starlet Productions, you swallow the cream, we give you the green. Oh, hi, Mrs. Huntington. Yeah, Roger’s right here.”
I took the phone from Tooth, and waved him away. “Hi, Mom.”
“How much green we talking here?” she laughed
My mom was pretty cool, all things considered. “Only thing Tooth has that’s green are the skid marks in his panties. How’s Grandma?”
“Oh, great. She thinks she has Psittacosis.”
“Sounds bad.”
“It is, if you’re an owl. I don’t know where she gets this stuff from.”
“She’s not an owl, is she?”
“An old bird, yes, but there’s nothing wise in that addled brain.”
“Be nice. She gives me money for Christmas.”
“I’m glad I taught you not to be superficial.”
“I’m just kidding. I love the old bird.”
“Hey, you can’t call her that until you’ve lived with her for eighteen years.”
“Eighteen years with an owl?”
“Well, she can’t get her head all the way around yet but I doubt it’s for lack of trying. You and Jamie haven’t killed each other yet, have you?”
“Why, would that be bad?”
“It would if you got blood stains on my rug. Blood doesn’t come out without professional cleaning equipment.”
“I’ll lay down some tarp.”
“Good. But try to do it outside, if you could.”
“Agreed.”
“Is she up yet? I want to talk to her.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I’ll get her.”
“And, Roger?”
“What, Mom?”
“I love you. Sorry we had to take off so quickly after you got back.”
“No sweat. I’ll see you in a couple days.”
I didn’t realize I didn’t say I love you back, and I don’t think she thought too hard on it—she knew I did—but I regret it now.
I put the phone down and hollered for Jamie to pick it up upstairs, then went to take a shower.
CHAPTER 6
We had to go to Tooth’s house, which was on the other side of town, to get the other gun. It was a small yellow house with a couple of bedrooms, a wraparound porch held up by some four-by-fours, and lots of empty, forgotten beer bottles still standing where’d they’d been placed when finished. The crispy yellow front lawn looked like uncooked spaghetti, and a basketball net stood tilted in the dirt driveway like a giant metronome needle that had stopped slightly left of center. The net had been ripped long ago but a few remnants of tattered rope hung from it and blew in the slight breeze.
Tooth’s father was sitting on the porch with a beer in his hand, reading a magazine about cars or airplanes or something. I couldn’t really tell because it was old and faded, like the kind you always see in patches of weeds by abandoned parks. He looked up when we pulled in and wiped the beer can across his forehead in an attempt to cool down.
“Get the gun outta the back,” Tooth told me. “We gotta clean it before we put it away.”
I grabbed the gun, which was in a black plastic carrying case, and followed Tooth up to the porch. He mumbled an apathetic hello to his father, and disappeared inside. Sometimes I didn’t know if they were really family or just roommates. I nodded to the ex-preacher, hoping to pass by without any conversation, but luck was not on my side.
“How you been, Roger?” he asked with the gait of a doped-up turtle.
“I’ve been good, Mr. Elliott. How are you?”
“Well, can’t complain. Other’n the heat it’s been quiet. How you doing at school? Merv don’t tell me much about what he hears from you.”
“School is good,” I said, trying to end the conversation quickly. When he didn’t say any more, I figured that satisfied him so I headed for the door.
“That’s good, got to stay in school. I told that to Merv, but he don’t listen. Says he through with that shit . . . his words exactly.”
I stopped at this, hoping it was the last bit of afterbirth to come out of his ethanol-soaked mind, but he continued with words that almost made me pray for mercy.
“I’ve been thinking, Roger.”
Shit. In my book, listening to a drunk get philosophical is on par with rolling down a hill in a barrel full of nails. You get dizzy, your insides shriek with stabbing pain, and you end up someplace lower than where you started. I stopped and resolved to excuse myself politely at the first possible opportunity.
He ran his hand through the few remaining hairs on his head. “I ever tell you about the time I saw Jesus in the gymnasium when I was at seminary?”
Oh, Lord, only six hundred and four times. “Yeah, actually you did. You saw him drinking from the water fountain.”
“Well, let me tell you again. I know you think I’m just a crazy drunk, but I got methods to my madness. He was getting a drink,” he continued, his eyes glazing over as he looked into the past, voice slower than ice trying to melt in Siberia, “and when he bent over and turned on the water, it wasn’t water at all that come out, but wine. Took a long swig, He did, and then He turned to me and a tear fell from His eye and landed in the wine. When it struck, little blue bolts of lightning stitched themselves across the purple liquid and formed a cross.” He stopped and looked at me to make sure I was still listening, then went back to the past. “I put down my basketball and walked over to ask Him what it meant, but He turned and walked out of the room. I followed Him outside but when I got there, there wasn’t anybody in sight except a student I didn’t know. ‘You see anyone come out here?’ I asked. ‘No.’ I searched high a
nd low and never found Him. By the time I got back the wine was water again, and no evidence of Him having been there remained. Until today, I didn’t know what He was trying to tell me.”
That you’re insane, I wanted to say. Instead, I just smiled and said, “I gotta help Too—I mean Merv.”
He looked at me, eyes back from their holiday at the seminary, and took a sip of his beer. “Now wait, I’m getting to my point. I’ve been sitting out here all morning thinking on that, and I came up with a theory. What if every person has a purpose in life, but not one they can necessarily see or are even aware of. Like me for instance. Sure I drink, I don’t deny it. I got my problems—hell, we all got our problems—but suppose that’s my purpose, suppose my drinking causes a reaction somewhere else. And suppose that reaction is doing some good. Why else would He have drawn a cross in wine? See, Jesus was born to die on that cross, saved humanity by giving His life on it. That cross was His purpose for being. I think He was telling me my purpose in life was to drink—my cross, if you will, is to drink wine . . . or beer anyway.”
He looked down at his beer can, kind of chuckled; this was fucking torture. I could feel time stopping, the hair growing on my legs.
He continued: “I mean, beer, wine, same thing really. I just wish I knew how it was helping.”
If ever there was a man trying to justify his vices, Tooth’s dad was him. I don’t believe in God; I guess because my parents never made me go to church, but I do like to think there are things out there, out beyond space and time, that have a better understanding of life. Not in a religious way; I don’t think we should worship them, but it’s nice to think we’re not alone. And perhaps someday we’ll meet up with them, whatever they are, and learn from them. But I sure as shit didn’t think Jesus, even if He did exist, would make an appearance just to get a man drinking. First time I heard this story, I figured someone in their bathrobe must have stopped to get a drink from the fountain, saw that it was flowing with rust, and walked away. The blue cross? Who knows? Reflection from overhead lights most likely. I just figured the old man’s brain was pickled.
“Could be, Mr. Elliott. But I gotta help Merv.”
“Help him with what?”
Tooth’s father didn’t complain much about what Tooth did, but guns were something else. He might be a drunk, but he was still a good man.
“We’re gonna grab some tools and go work on my mom’s car,” I lied.
He took another swig of his beer and looked out toward the road. “Want me to help?” he asked. “I’m good with cars.”
Like the cavalry, Tooth popped his head out the door and said, “Roger, c’mon, before the Second Coming. We got shit to do.”
I left Mr. Elliot on the porch with his beer and followed Tooth to his room. It was as messy as it had been the last time I was there. A mattress on the floor covered with a sleeping bag, a small television on an old footlocker with a Playstation beside it. The floor seemed to be made of used clothes so rank with stink they’d fused together like a giant quilt. Several beer bottles sat atop the furniture, reeking of week-old Budweiser. Not to mention it was so hot inside you could spit and it would evaporate before it hit the floor.
In the corner was a dresser with every drawer pulled out so that it looked like poorly-constructed steps. Tooth slid it out from the wall and pulled out another black case like the one we’d just brought in. He opened it up. Inside, a black 9mm lay like a sleeping adder. He took it out and handed it to me.
“Feel how light it is.”
I hefted it and aimed it at the wall. It was far lighter than the .44, maybe about two pounds tops, and smaller as well. It fit in my hand like it had been built only for me.
“Make sure you check the chamber before you go pulling the trigger,” he told me. “Never too sure when I’m drunk whether I clear it out or not. More than once I found a bullet in there.”
I used both hands and cocked it like I’d seen in so many movies, sliding the chamber back and letting it snap forward again.
“It’s empty,” I told him.
He was smiling at me, like Dr. Frankenstein marveling at his monster. I must have looked hypnotized because he poked me. “Go ahead, pull the trigger, see how little tension there is.”
I pulled the trigger with ease and the gun went click. A wave of anticipation washed over me and left me feeling a little disturbed. I’d never been a gun freak before and didn’t know how to handle this new sense of power the weapon carried. I felt almost guilty for wanting to shoot it, see what type of destruction it could do. There was a wrongness to it all, so I handed it back and watched him put it in the case.
“How much did these cost you?” I asked.
“Got ’em both used, which is why the targeting is slightly off. Four hundred for the 9mm and six hundred for the .44.”
“That’s a lot of dough. If you’re making that kind of money why don’t you move out and get an apartment or something?”
He took two small bags out from behind the dresser. The first was a bag of marijuana, which he squeezed and then stuck in his back pocket. The second was small and black, and from it he removed some cleaning materials, including a little wire brush, some oil and a few rags, and began cleaning the .44. “Remember when I said I was gonna go to California?”
“Yeah, you say it all the time.”
“No, you remember when we were in jail and I said it?”
I remembered. That was the first time he told me he wanted to get away from everything.
“Well, that was the night I told myself I was really going to do it,” he said. “I started putting some money away every week since then. Nickels and dimes at first, then about twenty dollars a week since I got the job at Dataview. I’ve got myself a nice little stash. Three grand right now, and I still got some bills to pay, and I owe Dad a few months’ rent, but as soon as I hit five I’m leaving.”
“If you hadn’t bought the guns you’d have four grand.”
“And if I hadn’t fixed up that Camaro I could have left long ago, but I’d have had to walk there. These guns, they’re a bit of insurance. Besides, it’s not like it’s a bad thing to know how to shoot straight.” He stopped cleaning the gun, took off his hat and wiped the sweat from above his eyes. He looked at me with one of those looks that make people feel uncomfortable, like he was going to tell me how I’d die. “Quit that college shit and come out with me.”
“I can’t quit college, you know that.”
“No, I don’t. And yes, you can. You said you want to draw comics. Having a degree isn’t going to accomplish that. All it’s gonna do is get you nice little cubicle next to someone else’s nice little cubicle, where the two of you will swap family photos and talk about how cute your kids’ poopie is. You don’t need to study economics to get a job drawing Batman. You just need a pencil and paper and the know-how to draw a fucking cape and horns and—voila!—you’re living your dream.”
The sad thing was, he had a point. I wasn’t sure why I was going to college, other than it was what you were supposed to do, and my dad would rip my asshole out through my mouth if I quit. Also, I’d been conditioned to believe that a college diploma was like a skeleton key to the world. I was banking on that somewhat.
California would be great. I could see us now, surfing, drinking, just soaking in the sun. Probably be the only two idiots rooting for the Red Sox when they came to town. But, for now, it wasn’t in the cards for me. Would Tooth wait? No, he’d go, and he’d move on without me. I could feel it happening already, the slow separation of our lives. We’d survived this first year of college, but we hadn’t seen each other much. Adulthood was coming in like a wedge to our friendship. Was this summer our last one together, the final hoorah for the road?
I heard Mr. Elliot come in the house and open the refrigerator, clank beer bottles together, and saw Tooth scrub a little bit harder at the .44’s barrel. The fridge door closing was followed by some serious coughs and a loogie being hacked up from so far down it p
robably had “Made in China” stamped on it.
“Is he all right?” I asked.
“Who knows. I ain’t seen him sober in a while but he don’t bug me either so . . . . He says God will take care of him, and then he starts preaching to me about faith and I have to run out of the house. He quit working at the mill a few months ago and filed for workman’s comp when a log fell on his leg. You don’t need to be Kreskin to know he was drunk and caused the thing to fall on himself.”
I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with his father, watching the man seep down through the floorboards of degradation before your eyes. But that was the life Tooth chose and, thus far, he hadn’t seemed to mind it let alone try to fix the problem. I guess some problems were too big to fix and you just hoped they would take care of themselves. I felt uncomfortable for having brought it up so I changed the subject. “Batman doesn’t have horns, he has ears.”
“What?”
“Batman has ears, not horns. You said I had to know how to draw horns.”
“Man, you’re a geek sometimes. C’mon, this is clean enough. Grab the 9mm and let’s go.”
Tooth put the case with the .44 in it back behind the dresser, slid the dresser back in place, then went into the kitchen and grabbed some beers. We walked out of the stifling house into equally stifling afternoon dust. A cloud of gnats trying to fly through the screen door turned their attention to our eyes and mouths and Tooth swatted them with his cap. Mr. Elliot was back sitting in his place on the porch. As we walked by, I kept my head down, pretending to be wrapped up in my sneakers so he wouldn’t talk to me.
“Got to have a purpose in life,” he said as I opened the car door. I was still pretending to be interested in my feet when Tooth started the car and we sped away.
CHAPTER 7
The Camaro rumbled down the road like a metallic fart with a purpose. Heat wave rose off the baking blacktop as I searched for a radio station worth listening to. In the part of the county we were in, I knew we wouldn’t get much but country music—which explained all the goth kids and wannabe punks who infested the shops along main street, just begging for an alternative. Only way we’d get any good radio would be to head north toward Canada or a few hours south toward Boston.
The Summer I Died: A Thriller Page 4