I stopped buffing Ginny’s hood. “How do you know about him?” I hadn’t said anything to them. It didn’t seem worth it until the Old Girls signed on.
“Jaime told him,” Crock said. Swish! He fired a jumper from three-point land (my lawn). The ball went straight through the net.
“Yeah? What else did she tell you?”
Ev lined up another outside shot, and I could tell it was going to miss. It was going to dent my car. So, like a dumb-ass, instead of going for the rebound directly, I threw myself on Ginny’s hood, shielding her from the ball.
Then, of course, as I was spread out like that, looking like a doofus, I heard the purr of an engine and lifted my head in time to see the girls pull up in Jaime’s parents’ Volkswagen Rabbit.
I stood up real quick.
I watched Sonia unfold herself, colt-like, from the passenger side, and everything from my head to my nuts slid and jolted so hard it felt like my guts were doing a slam dance.
She was one long, thin girl. Her brown eyes were the size of 45s. She had teased-up black hair and a skinny, grabbable rattail of a braid that had grown a couple of inches since we’d been together. Now it was glossy and sleek like a whip, and it hung over her left shoulder and reached down to the crevice between her boobs. I wanted to kiss the length of it like I used to. I wanted to feel the crack of it across my face.
She came closer and I inhaled her scent, all musky, like cinnamon and damp earth.
I didn’t realize I was shaking until Ev put a hand on my arm in a be cool gesture.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked toward the girl of my life. “Hey,” I said. “I’m glad you—”
She held up her palm like a traffic cop. “Why didn’t you tell Jaime about the money?” she said.
“What money?”
“Oh yeah,” Crock said. “I made some calls. There’s a purse. Not just airplay and studio time.”
“How big?” I said.
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Crock said.
Money. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Of course that would reel her in. Sonia’s dad was a self-made man with a chain of appliance stores. He wasn’t big on spreading his cash around, though. So while the Krajiceks had a condo at Mount Bachelor and another one in Cabo San Lucas, Sonia would have to work her way through college. Her dad acted like he was doing her a big favor, but you could tell he cared less about her than about sipping cabernet in a hot tub somewhere.
Meanwhile, Jay was getting out of the car from the other side, wearing an outfit so bright and polka-dotted she looked like Minnie Mouse.
“It’s not a lot if you split it five ways . . .” Crock went on.
“Six,” I said. “We’ve got Ziggy now.”
Sonia’s record-sized eyes popped out a little more, and she shot Jaime a look. “You want us to split our prize money with him? Isn’t that taking it a little far?” she said.
I thought about saying, It was his idea. He deserves a cut. But I looked at my ex, who was here in front of me but already backing away, and I screwed Ziggy completely.
“You’re right,” I said. “We can probably talk him into working pro bono.”
Another snort from Crock.
After what seemed like a beat too long, Jaime asked Sonia quietly, “Should we go in?”
“I got Milk Duds. And Tab,” I said. I knew it was her favorite snack combo. She loved picking Duds out of her teeth.
“All right,” she said at last. “As long as you know I’m in it for the money. This is just business. Understand?” She jabbed me in the chest.
My crooked fingers ached with longing. I wanted her to hurt me over and over again.
“Sure. No prob.”
• • •
I led them all down to the basement. Ev’s eyes flicked to the spot on the wall where the stain was showing through. He’d been here the day of Dad’s accident too.
Everyone else rushed ahead to their stations.
Ev’s bass and my guitar were on stands in the corner by the amp, next to the upright piano with faux wood paneling. I figured Sonia wouldn’t be “in” enough to bring her kit, so I found upturned paint buckets and a Folgers Crystals coffee can. As I may have mentioned: Sonia can beat on anything.
Crock found the food.
He pulled a six-pack of Tab from the drippy basement fridge and set it on the Formica coffee table, along with a tray of tea sandwiches (peanut butter and grape jelly) and a carefully arranged pyramid of Milk Duds.
“Did you really cut the crusts off these?” Crock said, double-fisting the sandwiches.
I nodded. “Dud?” I offered Sonia.
“Those things look like rabbit poop,” Crock said, his mouth sticky and his speech slurring from the peanut butter.
“They’re not for you, ass-wipe,” I said. Crock kept eating.
There was a tinny, out-of-tune clang. Jay was testing the piano. She played a couple of runs that sounded classical. Probably Beethoven. It was Jaime’s version of warming up.
She played the runs again, but she began to change the beat, put a little hesitation in it. 1–2, 1–2–3. Waiting until the last moment to play the next note. That little bit of syncopation gave it a Latin feel.
Sonia, meanwhile, found the coffee can and started shaking it like a maraca.
I opened a Tab and sipped, closing my eyes. Do you hear it? I heard Ziggy’s voice in my head. Do you hear how it could be?
Yes, I thought. Yes and yes and yes. My buddies were weaving a kind of Latin magic around me. Ev and me could pick it up at any time and words would follow. Two verses. A bridge. A chorus.
Then it was over with a shriek.
“Stop it, stop it, stop it! Do you have any idea what time it is?”
Cilla came down the stairs wearing nothing but an oversized football jersey, her bleached hair sticking up in a rat’s nest, the skin under her eyes thin and purple. She looked like someone’s tragic heroin-addicted girlfriend.
Sonia and Jay stopped playing.
“Do you know how late I worked this morning?”
It was a rhetorical question. Any time of day or night was too late for her.
“You,” my sister went on, glaring at Sonia. “What the hell are you doing here? You said Noah was an asshole and you were better off without him, remember?”
“It’s just business,” Sonia said in such a soft voice it sounded as though her mouth was jammed with peanut butter. Which it wasn’t.
“Whatever,” Cilla said. “Look, if you want to start up with my brother again, be my guest. Break more fingers. Break anything you want. I don’t care. But you can’t practice here. I work nights. You guys almost drove me to the loony bin last time.”
I felt rage wash over me. My hands balled into fists at my sides.
“Why don’t you move out, then?” I said.
She glared at me. “What?”
I felt the leather of my square-toed boots thicken. I wanted to stomp her into chunky salsa. “I said: Why don’t you move out?”
Jay closed the lid on the highball piano, with the watermarks from years of our parents’ guests setting down their scotch and sodas, and looked at a watch she wasn’t wearing. “Sonia and I have to study,” she said. “Personal finance.” Then she mumbled something that sounded like “worth half a grade.”
Sonia shuffled her feet, then swept some Milk Duds directly into her purse. “See you, Noah,” she said.
Crock and Ev followed them, muttering blah blah ride home blah blah blah, even though Crock only had to go across the street.
I heard the front door open and close.
Fuckin’ A. I’d almost done it. I’d actually gotten us back together, for five whole minutes. Then my stupid-bitch sister ruined it.
She started shrieking even before the front door closed. “What gives you the right to boss me around?”
“Easy. You’re twenty-one years old. You’ve got a job. You don’t pay rent and you never do the dishes.”
“I do t
he dishes. I do the dishes plenty.”
“—I mow the lawn. I vacuum—”
“—I’m up late working hard. Not something you’d understand.”
And then I did it. The one thing I vowed I’d never do.
I pushed her.
This was no mosh pit. There was no one behind her to help her up. She fell backward onto the stairs, and even though she didn’t crack her head, she might as well have. That look of wild-eyed fear that came over her—I’d seen it many times before, but never pointed at me.
It only lasted a second, then she was back to being the Cilla I knew, the boss of me and untold legions of shiftless truckers, and I was back to being Noah, the kid who looked tough but who never ever fought back.
“Please. Don’t say it,” I begged.
She got to her feet, and even though she was my height, she towered over me. “You’re no better than Dad.”
That was all I could take. I ran past her up the stairs, outside, and into Ginny, feeling like I was never going to breathe again.
• • •
I drove aimlessly, thinking, What have I done?
If there was one thing I’d learned living with an abusive asshole, it was how to avoid one. Most of the time you can find a corner to hide in until the booze wears off, or payday comes, or they bag a black-tailed deer, or their football team wins the Rose Bowl, or whatever they need in order to feel good about themselves again and don’t have to take their shitty life out on you.
But that was no help today. What happens when you’re the abusive asshole?
Where do you hide from yourself?
I WOUND UP AT THE CINEMA 21, an art house theater in northwest Portland. I liked to go to that neighborhood because it was what Mom called “in transition.” Meaning Heidi’s Olde Worlde Pastries had vacated the chalet-type building, and a General Gao’s Szechuan Garden had moved in. There were ancient apartment buildings with rats in the dumbwaiters next door to brightly lit Austrian bakeries.
The Cinema 21 might have been due for an overhaul, but so far no one had tried. And honestly? I liked it the way it was. Reliable. Same neon starburst marquee, same bottomless popcorn for seventy-five cents a bag.
That night they were showing Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. It was supposed to be a good flick but I hadn’t seen it yet, because it was a Bowie movie.
I was sick of Bowie by then. He was on every poster in every girl’s locker, an impossible standard to live up to. But there was something comforting about him too. He changed everything about himself, his hair and makeup and name and even his voice, but he kept something in each. Self-assurance. Calm.
Even in the movie, when Bowie is supposed to be a suicidally brave POW in a World War II prison camp—with bad hair (shyeah, right)—and he’s locked in a cage, muttering the words “I wish I could sing,” because his character supposedly can’t, there’s this larger-than-life presence. He would never hit his sister. He would never cheat on his girlfriend . . . Well, yeah, he might, but at least he’d do it with style.
Dad used to hate Bowie. We watched him on TV once when I was little, and Bowie was in his Aladdin Sane phase then, with spiky red hair and a spandex jumpsuit. I don’t remember what he sang. Some song about space. Or was it loneliness? The way he sang, it was the same thing.
Dad pulled on his beer that looked like golden water and said, “Do me a favor and change it to the Blazers game, will ya, son? I can’t stand watching that faggot.”
Since I was just a kid, I didn’t know what “faggot” meant, other than not Dad. Which seemed like a good thing.
Even now, when I was eighteen, not Dad was something I had to work hard at every day. When my hair started coming in thick and dark like his, I dyed it green. When people started bugging me, I went to the mosh pit to thrash it out before I thrashed them.
Today was my first big fail.
I had hit someone I loved. She was bossy and ambitionless, but I still loved her.
For two hours during the movie, I thought it might be possible that I could still be a hero, like Bowie’s character. But then the closing credits rolled, and ended, and a different kind of picture looped in my mind—one of me pushing my sister, over and over again.
Why did she have to keep picking at me? Do this, nimrod. Do that, nimrod. Sometimes I hated her.
But I never hit her.
What was Cilla doing now? Blabbing to Mom? Blabbing to any Denny’s trucker about how I was turning out just like Dad? The instant she did, the half of the state that hadn’t already written me off would write me off. I would go from being an asshole to being “just like my father.”
That was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.
Outside the theater, a light rain had started to fall, making my mohawk flop over. Green dye trickled down my forehead and into my eyes, making everything look like an alien landscape from some cheesy sci-fimovie. I was walking past the narrow employees’ parking lot behind the theater. I remember thinking, I wish I could get out of my skin for more than two hours, when I first felt the chill.
It wasn’t a regular cold chill, or even a flu chill. It was worse than that. I’d felt it once before, when I’d been so terrified it felt like my blood had frozen.
There was a scuttling noise, then a high-pitched squeak, like a dozen rats on the move.
Noah.
Someone was calling me, and it didn’t sound like Ziggy.
I stopped and looked. There was a line of beat-up cars, Pintos and Pacers, and behind that was a dumpster overflowing with stale popcorn and Red Vines and Junior Mints.
I couldn’t see beyond the dumpster. It was too dark. But—and this was the weird thing—the darkness had an edge. There was normal stuff in front of it, cars and garbage cans, then just nothing. Whatever was calling me was inside that dark fog bank.
Noah, it said again.
I sniffed the air. Hops. It smelled really strongly of cooking hops.
Slowly, the dark cloud rolled closer. Whatever it touched looked as though it disappeared, as if the cloud swallowed it whole.
Clouds didn’t freak me out. We had clouds that belched rain, hail, pollution, radioactive isotopes (Trojan Nuclear Plant)—even volcanic ash (Mount St. Helens).
But there was something different about this one—and it wasn’t just the smell. First, there was the frost, which seemed to inject itself right into my heart and spread through my veins. If I wasn’t still breathing, I would’ve thought I’d been turned to ice. But breathe I did, and dark green clouds came out of my nose like frozen bile.
This cloud was poison. And it was sucking me in.
Noah!
The voice was more urgent now.
Let me whisper in your ear. Let me tell you what I’ve already done and what I’m about to do to everyone you love.
The cloud came closer with a skittering noise, advancing, retreating, changing shape, as though something inside it—several things—were fighting to get out.
Help us, Noah!
Girls’ faces, half formed, came to the front.
And then that whispering, disembodied voice again: Shall I tell you about them? How they died alone and afraid? Their terror fed me. It made me strong.
Slowly, I started to back away. I was getting sick, that was it. I hadn’t been sleeping enough. No wonder I was imagining things.
Watch, Noah. Witness.
Then came the one I’d been fearing. The girl from the poster without a name or a reward or Last Seen Wearing. I knew what she was going to say.
Please!
Oh god. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t sleep-deprived. That thing—that toxic darkness—had consumed the Disappearing Girls.
I should’ve run. But I couldn’t move. I could only stand and watch what I half knew was coming next.
When Please Girl’s face disappeared, another didn’t appear right away. The inky darkness started to twirl, then locked itself into dreads. Another face flashed across the front of the cloud, screwed up in agony. I heard
the scream from my head clear down to my toes.
That thing had Evan.
I didn’t even think. I charged forward. “Hey!” I said. “Let him go!”
I hadn’t gone two steps before—bam!—I tripped on a speed bump and went down hard, banging my forehead on asphalt.
Red blood and green dye dripped into my eyes like an insane Christmas garland. I needed to see what was going on, but my head was so heavy it was like an anchor.
I had to get to my feet and charge that cloud. I had to save my friend.
Help me, Noah!
And then, from somewhere above me, came a light. It was golden and warm. “Sing, lad!” it commanded.
Not golden light, I realized. Yellow. Egg-yolk yellow.
“Huh?”
“Sing! Sing now!” And that was when I realized my pounding head had a backbeat. Without looking up, I opened my mouth and sang about fear, and failure, and all the things I’d been worrying about for most of my life. If I had to give the song a title, I would’ve called it “You Don’t Got Brain One.”
I was too confused even to stand up, but all the ways I’d failed people? That I remembered.
I sensed the thing stopping. I closed my mouth and wiped the red rain from my eyes. I managed to get to my knees and look up. I hoped I wasn’t too late.
The dark cloud had retreated. It hovered behind the dumpster, waiting for something—I didn’t know what.
It wasn’t calling to me anymore, wasn’t screaming, and there were no faces inside. But it was still dangerous. And it still had Evan.
Ziggy gripped me by the forearm and helped me to my feet. “You okay, lad?”
I charged forward. “That thing has my friend!”
He locked my arm with his tiger grip. I couldn’t shake him off. “It’s not that simple. You can’t take it on directly or it’ll swallow you too.”
“I can’t just leave him there!”
“Easy, old boy. The Marr hasn’t swallowed him completely. Not yet. He’s safe in bed. If you called him at home right now, you’d get him. He’d wonder why you woke him up.”
“I don’t understand. I just saw his face!”
The Rise and Fall of the Gallivanters Page 4