One of the Boys

by Daniel Magariel

  I walked out to the living room.

  “No activity,” I reported.

  He thanked me, said to go to bed. Then he told me to stop. He stood there, staring blankly out the window to the park, his underwear illuminated by the bright night sky. He’d calmed. I’d done that for him. I could feel his gentleness now. “Tomorrow,” he said, almost tenderly, “I’m going up to the complex to tell them what kind of white trash we have living in this building. That’ll teach the three of them to fuck with us again.”

  SIX

  I asked my brother if he thought our dad was high.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Good,” I said.

  We were coming back from the Laundromat, trash bags of clean clothes in hand, returning to our new apartment, at the opposite end of the complex. For the same price as the old, plus two months free, my father had leveraged the rental office to give us a bigger unit (first floor, back porch, still with a view of the park) as far as possible from Mr. Aguilar and the girls.

  At the front door my brother asked if it was locked or unlocked.

  It was my turn to guess, his turn to ask.

  “Locked,” I said.

  He set down his bags, checked. It was locked.

  “Remember,” he said, curling his arm into a muscle, “the harder you hit me, the harder I hit you next time.” I felt puny next to him. He’d filled out since we’d moved here, his biceps much bigger than mine. His shirts barely fit anymore. At least I was in line to inherit some of his old stuff. He was going to have to ask our dad for new clothes. I noticed a hole in his collar, tried to finger it.

  “Don’t make it worse,” he snapped.

  I called him a sore loser, punched him as hard as I could.

  “You hit like a girl,” he said.

  My brother pulled out his key, unlocked the door. It opened only a few inches before stopping abruptly. My father had installed a chain lock. He let us in a moment later. Inside, the apartment was dark. Smoke swirled in beams of daylight shooting through the cracks in the blinds. Two girls not much older than my brother were sitting on the couch. The one nearest us smiled. She was in her bra. The other said something in Spanish in the direction of my father’s room. A guy about the same age as the girls came out.

  “Let’s get some air in here,” my father said.

  He motioned the girls into his room, closed the door behind the four of them.

  We set down the laundry. My brother went to open the windows. I dabbed out a cigar burning in the ashtray, then collected cocktail glasses.

  “Who are they?” I asked him.

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “How old are they?”

  He didn’t know that either.

  In our room I pointed to my brother’s bed.

  “Motherfucker,” he said.

  “More like daughterfucker,” I said.

  With a tissue my brother removed a condom from his sheets.

  My father knocked on our door a few minutes later, waited for us to invite him in. But for a few silver hairs his stubble was long and black and crept up to his cheekbones. He needed a shave. He was restless. Random muscles fired with a sudden unstable energy. He chewed the chain of his necklace, the Kokopelli pendant anchored somewhere in his shirt.

  “I need you to take my friends home,” he told my brother.

  “I’m going with him,” I said.

  “No, I need you.” He turned to my brother again. “And you, be back in ten.”

  My brother took the keys, stormed out.

  I followed my father. Since we’d moved to this apartment, my brother and I had not been allowed to enter his bedroom. We hadn’t even helped him set it up. Now inside, I saw that his bed was neatly made, blanket tucked at the corners. The paintings of adobe dwellings he’d had in his room in our last apartment were leaning against the wall, still to be hung. Aside from a glass of water on his bedside table there was little proof that someone lived here. The drawers might have been bare. He began to undress.

  “Give me a five-minute warning,” he said.

  “Are we going somewhere?” I asked.

  I walked into his bathroom, turned the shower to his preferred temperature. My job was to alert him five minutes after he’d gotten in. I took a moment to check for evidence. His wastebasket was empty. The toilet seat was down, sink top clear. I could see beneath his bed from where I stood. Nothing there either. He’d covered his tracks.

  “Are we going somewhere?” I asked again, walking out of the bathroom.

  My dad stood there naked, wild-looking. His skin was ashy. His chest hair was gray. His stomach shrunken, testicles low. A deep breath revealed more rib than I’d remembered. “If Janice calls,” he said, “tell her we’ll be over shortly.”

  In the kitchen I rinsed out the glasses. I scrubbed the spoons I found in the sink. The burn marks did not come out. They were all like that. On the countertop there was a white powder. I touched it with my finger, put some up to my nose, sneezed. I wiped up the baking soda with a sponge. Who were those girls? And that guy? I looked at the clock. How long had my brother been gone already? I opened the front door to hear the rumble of the Jeep whenever he returned. Then I went to put away our clean clothes.

  The phone rang. It was Janice. I told her that we’d be over shortly.

  “Coming over?” she said. “No, not today. I told your father that he can come by anytime tomorrow. Please tell him again. Or just have him call me, OK? Today is no good. He knows this.”

  My father had picked up Janice a month or so ago, across the street at the grocery store where my brother worked. He’d spotted her in the frozen food section, sent me on a scouting mission to check her ring finger for a ROG-er, a Ring of Gold.

  “Negative on that ROG-er, Dodger,” I’d reported back.

  “Hold down the fort, Hawkeyes,” he’d said, strolling up the aisle.

  It wasn’t until after he had learned of Janice’s impending divorce settlement that he remarked to us kids that in addition to having already gotten her business he might also now get some business. My brother and I overheard a phone call between them: she was going to lend him ten thousand dollars. Janice was naïve, way too trusting. We were certain she knew nothing about the drugs.

  My father yelled, “What happened to my five-minute warning?”

  I told Janice that I had to go and hung up the phone. I hurried to his room. He’d shaved, combed his hair. I thought the shower might have sobered him some.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Your brother home?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Is he OK, you think?” He didn’t answer. He wasn’t paying attention. Or was pretending to not pay attention. He was on his bed struggling to put on a sock that was twisted so the crease popped over his middle toes. “Janice called,” I said. “She wants you to call her.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Yes, I told her, but she wants you to call her.” I waited a few seconds for him to respond. “She said today is no good. She said tomorrow would be great. Maybe this isn’t such good idea.”

  He asked me what I thought about Janice. “Not so pretty as the day we met her, is she? Not like her daughter.” He said he could always close his eyes during sex and imagine Reagan instead. “That girl’s built for speed.” He laughed, slapped his knee. He stared at me until I grinned.

  The front door slammed.

  My brother charged into the bedroom, ready for a fight.

  “Where have you been?” my father asked. “What took you so long?”

  “Your friends live on the west side.”

  My father gnashed his teeth. “I told you to drop them off downtown.”

  My brother raised his voice. “You told me to take them home.”

  Instead of firing back my father stopped himself, thought for a moment, trying to recall his exact instructions. His face, gradually turning confused, went blank altogether. He’d lost his train of thought. The pace of the conversation dece
lerated instantly. You could see the change in my brother’s posture too. He just gave up. What was the point?

  My father sighed deeply. I turned to him, hopeful for an apology, or even a shred of self-awareness. But it was the second sock—this one inside out. He lifted his legs. I pulled both socks off, put them back on his feet correctly. “Put on a decent shirt,” he told my brother. “We’re going to meet Janice’s mother.”

  * * *

  On the way we stopped by the grocery store for flowers. My father was turning in to an open spot when he slammed into the car parked next to us. He reversed, the cars scraped apart. He realigned and pulled in straight.

  “Be right back,” he said.

  My brother and I got out to survey the damage. There was a huge dent in the center of the other car’s door. Our Jeep was fine. My brother jumped into the driver’s seat, backed out, pulled up to the yellow curb marked “No Parking” next to the entrance to the grocery store.

  “Janice doesn’t want us to come over,” I said.

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m not joking. I talked to her on the phone.”

  “What the fuck? I like Janice,” my brother said. “I like going to her place.”

  He liked going there to see Reagan. They were in the same grade, same school, and were always flirting or giggling with each other whenever we hung out at her house.

  “Shouldn’t we try and stop him?” I asked.

  My brother was distracted, engrossed in his own private thoughts.

  “What are we going to do?”

  Again, he ignored me.

  My father came out of the grocery store, sunglasses on, in a burgundy silk shirt and khaki shorts, which he was wearing too high, no doubt to show off what he considered his best feature. He walked into the street, raising his hand to halt traffic. My brother waited, watched him for several seconds, then honked.

  “We’re not doing shit,” he said finally. “Fuck him.”

  My father made his way over, hopped into shotgun.

  “I thought you were getting flowers,” I said.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  He slipped me a twenty.

  I came back out a minute later with a bouquet and his change.

  * * *

  We drove south along the Sandias until we veered onto a slender dirt road. Janice’s house was a mile or two into the foothills where Albuquerque met wilderness. Mountain lions sometimes dug through her garbage. She had a deck overlooking the city.

  When she opened the front door, she asked where our dad was.

  He’d dropped us at the driveway, sent us in first to grease the wheels. He needed to take a lap around the neighborhood before coming in. That wasn’t all he was doing, I was sure.

  “He’ll be back in a minute,” my brother said.

  “Did you give him my message?” she asked me.

  “Yes, I did. I told him.”

  She shook her head, ushered us inside, closed the door. I half-expected her to lock it.

  We followed her upstairs to the kitchen, where an older woman was struggling to open a bottle of wine. She looked like Janice, short and frumpy, with closely cropped hair parted neatly down the side and combed over like a man’s. Janice introduced her mother as Patricia, who told us to call her Pat. She then introduced us as the children of her “new financial advisor.” At that we understood that she had not wanted us to come over because of her recent divorce, all this being too soon.

  My brother broke the ice, asked Pat about her stay in Albuquerque. I popped the cork, poured two glasses. My father was taking his time, and the more he took, the more my breath came back to me. I’d been holding it all afternoon. My brother seemed unaffected by the awkwardness. He was enjoying the tension, relishing what was to come. I felt sorry for Janice. For myself too, but still this was her home, her family, and we’d been thrown at them. She kept checking her watch, holding a smile, attempting to appear hospitable. She must have maintained the same forced expression for a half hour before my father finally crept around the corner, roared as if on stage, “So, this is the mother?” Pat swung around right into a hug. “I’ve heard so much about you,” he lied, pretending to be closer to Janice than he was.

  Pat staggered back, flowers now in her hands. She turned to her daughter. “Who is this handsome man with such polite children?”

  “I told you, Mother.”

  “Yes, I know, your new financial advisor.” Pat winked at my father. “Won’t you stay for a glass of wine?”

  “No,” Janice said. “You’ll be late for your other appointment, won’t you? Didn’t you say you had somewhere else to be?” Janice went to her purse, pulled out a bank envelope, handed it to my father. “Thank you for stopping by.”

  My father pulled a money order from the envelope, examined it. In reference to business he always said, Get a yes and get out. He’d gotten the money. It was time to go. We still might have been able to make it to the bank before it closed. But I could tell by the look on his face that we weren’t going anywhere. He was stunned and insulted, thinking that if one of them had the right to be embarrassed it was him for dating her.

  “A glass of wine would be lovely,” he said.

  * * *

  In the living room my father sat next to Pat. Janice positioned herself close to the two of them. More than once she tried to trap my father with eye contact. He avoided looking in her direction, ignored her completely. He’d scooted up to the edge of the couch, kept himself angled toward Pat. Whatever he’d done out in the Jeep had helped him flip a switch. If anything now he was too loud, too energetic, his lungs drawing more than his share of oxygen. Janice’s reservations about our meeting her mother were swallowed up by his big baying laugh.

  From nowhere my brother suddenly gasped.

  My father turned to him with a sharp aggressive glare.

  It was a warning: this is my show—don’t interrupt.

  Everyone went silent until my brother apologized.

  Seconds later he nudged me to look at our dad. At first glance, though, I couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Up and down, nothing seemed different about my father. I turned to ask my brother for a hint and saw out of the corner of my eye what he’d wanted to show me. At the edge of the couch, his shorts having rolled back, my dad’s balls were dangling against the sofa. I turned away, then glanced again, a little longer this time. I had to stop myself from gawking. I bit my fist to keep from cracking up. My father was clueless. He had no idea. He was a primate masquerading as a human, an ape sipping from a stemmed glass. My brother must have thought so too because when our dad scratched his head, we both burst into laughter.

  “Shut. Up!” my father yelled. He held his scowl this time.

  Quiet filled the room.

  Even Pat looked uncomfortable.

  Janice started but then stopped.

  No one knew what to say next.

  My father apologized to Pat for us and asked, “What were you saying, dear?”

  My brother flashed me a wry smile. I eyed Janice. She was too transfixed by her dilemma to notice anything. Plus she didn’t have the best angle to see. She turned to the doorway as Reagan walked into the room. Reagan went to kiss her grandmother on the cheek, then said hello to everyone else. She gave my brother a sweet smile.

  “What’s new, babe?” my father asked her.

  She did not answer immediately. She hadn’t heard him. She was making her way to my brother, who was eagerly waving her over. When she sat down, I saw him tip his head to clue her in, direct her eyes to our dad’s shorts. She turned to my father, studied him, his testicles now hanging prominently over the seam of the seat cushion. My mood changed in an instant. I felt myself come alive in Reagan’s silence. I wanted her to see. I wanted my father humiliated. I hated him at this moment. But instead she turned to my brother and shrugged. A flood of anger washed over me. My father would get away with this for a lifetime—the arrogance, the self-regard, the lack of consequences.
>
  “Well?” my father said.

  “Sorry, what?” Reagan said, facing him again.

  “How have you . . .”

  She shrieked. She covered her mouth, drew her legs up to her chest. She looked at my brother, then at me, her eyes growing wider. She knew. I was overjoyed. The thrill of hatred consumed me again, and we all turned to my father together, howling as if on cue.

  “What’s so funny?” he said, his anger rising.

  “What’s gotten into you rotten children?” Pat said.

  “Stop it. All of you!” my father roared. “Stop it, now!”

  Janice tried to intervene. She asked my father for a word in the other room.

  Instead he stood, became more threatening. The cuffs of his shorts dropped. His balls back in their place made us laugh even louder. “What the fuck is so funny?” he screamed. “Stop fucking laughing!”

  His wineglass shattered in his hand.

  “In the kitchen, now!” Janice yelled.

  Her raised voice stopped us all cold. It was so unnatural, so unlike her. She commanded the room, our laughter dying down quickly, her finger directing my father to the doorway. He looked at his hand. It was bleeding onto the carpet. He put it in his pocket, mumbled an apology to the floor. “Please excuse me,” he said. He followed Janice into the next room, that dumb hangdog look on his face.

  * * *

  Out on the porch I watched the city swell before the sunset. Isolated rainstorms looked like pencil scratches in the distance. Inside, Reagan and my brother set the table. Janice and her mother prepared dinner. After they’d spoken in the kitchen, my father left the house, drove off. He probably went straight to the bank. I could have guessed the line he’d used on Janice to explain his behavior—single dad, struggling business, sleep deprived from stress. He’d probably even convinced her to babysit us for the night. Either way it didn’t matter. I wasn’t mad at him any longer. The more I replayed the scene in my head, the less I enjoyed it. My instinct earlier in the day had been to protect him from himself, then, after, I’d wanted his complete loss of face. Now I heard the echo of cruel laughter. But mostly I was just relieved that I hadn’t had to leave with him.