by John Inman
“Cat burglaring?”
“If you say so.”
“I like the fact that you’re mysterious, Larry.”
I chuckled. “Thanks.”
“I also like the fact that you come like a fire hose.”
“Please don’t mention that to my mother.”
He gave me a secretive smile. “No, I suppose I shouldn’t. Maybe you should have warned her about me.”
“You mean warned her that you were hot in bed and could suck a dick like a starving aardvark slurping up a hill of ants?”
“No, I mean warned her that I’m blind.”
“Honestly, I didn’t think to mention it.”
“Hmm.”
“Even I don’t think about it much.”
He pondered that. “Really? You don’t think about me being blind?”
“You mean other than feeling blessed about not having to worry if I have something unfortunate hanging out of my nose because it’s okay even if I do because you can’t see it anyway? You mean like that?”
“Hmm,” he said again. “Not exactly.”
I smiled, and he seemed to know, because he smiled back. He picked up the blow dryer and blasted hot air in my face, just to be mean.
Thirty minutes later we were dressed and at my dear mother’s door.
My mother answered on the third knock. Thank God she wasn’t stoned. Her bright eyes, as sharp as chipped granite, landed immediately on Kenny’s white cane, then traveled up his arm to his face.
“Who’s this?” she asked sweetly. Sweet was a stretch for my mother, but she carried it off pretty well.
“This is Kenny,” I said. “My new boyfriend.”
Kenny jumped at that, but he looked pleased. He stuck out his hand, not exactly in my mom’s direction, more like five degrees off.
She noticed the error right away. Leaning in closer, she studied Kenny’s face, and then her eyes skipped to me. I lifted my eyebrows high as if it to ask “So what do you think?” When her gaze traveled back to Kenny, there was kindness, and a little bit of intrigue, shimmering in her rheumy old eyes.
“Hello, Kenny,” she chirped. “You’re too handsome for my son.”
I groaned while Kenny frowned. “Why?” he asked. “Is he ugly? He never told me he was ugly.”
My mother studied me for a second. She looked like she was having the time of her life. “Well, he’s not exactly Farley Granger.”
Kenny blinked at that. “Who?”
“Never mind.”
Mom clutched Kenny’s arm and dragged him through the door, leaving me standing on the stoop like a side order of prunes nobody wanted. For lack of a better plan, I followed them inside.
I found Mom gently directing Kenny to the sofa, then going through a whole big rigmarole about fluffing up the sofa cushions around him, telling him she liked his shirt, asking if he was comfortable, asking if she could put his cane over here out of the way, asking if he liked vodka martinis.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Martinis? It’s ten o’clock in the morning. I thought we were having brunch.”
“Right,” she said, as if I had always been a little slow and she was used to it. “That’s what the olives are for.”
No matter what she said, I knew my mother’s martinis were anything but brunch. They generally run to a half gallon of straight Stoli with a drop or two of vermouth tossed in as an afterthought. “But I’m driving,” I tried to explain.
Mom laughed at that, as if the very idea was absurd. “Oh, I don’t think you’ll be driving any more today, dear. You’ll be lucky if you can walk.”
On the tail of that threat, she handed me a freshly stirred martini in a stemmed glass large enough to house a school of goldfish. Then she gave one to Kenny and finally served up one for herself. Each glass had a swizzle stick the size of a kebab skewer, impaling five fat olives, one on top of the other. Jesus, it really was brunch.
Kenny was already chomping on an olive. He took a long sip from his martini to wash it down and smacked his lips. “Hmm, these are good!”
That scared me more than anything. But being a firm believer in fate, and figuring events were already far beyond my control no matter what the hell I did, I plopped onto the sofa next to Kenny and sucked down a dollop of vodka. Rats. The martinis really were good.
My mother dragged an ottoman up to the front of the couch and parked herself at Kenny’s feet. With one hand she waved her martini around, sloshing it everywhere as she spoke, and with the other, she tenderly patted Kenny’s knee.
“So are you a software engineer as well?” she asked.
That took Kenny by surprise. “No. Why? Who’s the other one, Mrs. Boots?”
“Bootchinski,” my mother said. “Larry’s the only one who shamed the family by desecrating his name. I’m Mrs. Bootchinski, but you can call me Gladys. And the other software engineer is Larry, of course. Didn’t he tell you?”
I nabbed an olive with my teeth, determined to stay out of it.
Kenny shot a quick glance in the direction of my chewing, then quickly turned back to Mom. “I was under the impression he did something a little more daring,” he said.
My mother howled at that. “Daring? Larry?” Then she seemed suddenly gripped with guilt to be running down her son in front of his new paramour. “What I mean to say is, Larry’s a wonderful man. And daring is really in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?” She stammered around for a change of subject. “My glass seems to have a hole in it. Anyone else ready for refills?”
Neither Kenny nor I were, which clearly disappointed her, so to fill the gap in the conversation, Mom toddled over to the table and poured another four inches of vodka into her own glass from the pitcher. The ice in the pitcher tinkled merrily, and I began to wonder how I could ever have thought introducing my mother to Kenny was a good idea. Not knowing how to escape, I ate another olive and slurped down another ounce of Stoli.
In five seconds flat, Mom was back on the ottoman, and her hand was back on Kenny’s knee. “How did you lose your sight, dear?”
Leave it up to my mother to be subtle. However, since this was a subject I had never actually broached with Kenny, I leaned in close to hear the answer.
“Car accident,” Kenny said. “Four years ago. Head trauma caused damage to my optic nerves, and an infection set in. My sight was gone within a week.”
“I’m so sorry,” my mother said, and she looked like she meant it. “And it’s permanent?”
Kenny smiled at that. The smile didn’t touch his damaged eyes. This was clearly a topic he had thought a lot about, and who the hell wouldn’t? “They keep telling me no. That my sight could conceivably return. One morning I could wake up, and there it’ll be. I’ve seen no sign of it yet. No pun intended.”
Mom patted his hand. Unfortunately, it was the hand that held his martini. Vodka slopped on his shirt, which she didn’t notice, but he clearly did, and he hissed at the coldness of it on his skin. Then vodka from her drink slopped on his pants, and he hissed again. The poor guy was being bathed in booze. “Well, you’re very brave,” she said, not noticing the slopped vodka at all. “I hope my son doesn’t break your heart.”
It was my turn to slop my drink. “Mom!”
Kenny turned to me and laid his hand on my arm. He seemed amused by my discomfort. “If he does,” he said, “he does. But since we’ve only known each other a short while, I think it’s a bit early to worry about heartbreak.”
Even with my mother sitting two feet away, I managed to lose myself in Kenny’s green eyes. “If anyone’s in danger of getting a broken heart,” I said, “I think it’s me.”
At that, Kenny’s smile faded and became something a little more pensive. “I like the sound of that,” he said softly.
“Well, I don’t!” I barked.
I lifted his hand from my arm and pressed a kiss to his palm. Oddly enough, it was my mother who blushed.
“Oh my,” she cooed, watching us with big dreamy eyes, like a lov
esick teenager.
She reached over and patted my leg. “I think you’ve met your match this time, kid. I like this little blind boy of yours.” Then, out of the blue, she announced, “We should switch to something stronger.”
“Oh God,” I said, but everyone ignored me.
“Yes, let’s!” Kenny chirped like a nightingale, clearly on the verge of inebriation already. “I like drinking at ten o’clock in the morning!” There was a sliver of red pimento dangling from the corner of his mouth. I groaned and tossed back the rest of my martini. After catching my breath from the burning vodka, I peered down into the empty depths of my goldfish bowl and asked rhetorically, “What could possibly be stronger than this? Diesel fuel?”
“Oh, you kidder,” my mother gaily squealed. “Wait here, boys. I’ll be right back.”
She flounced off like a cheerleader.
Kenny was grinding his last olive to mush between those thirty-two beautiful choppers of his. When he turned his gaze to me, he had a simpering grin on his face, and his eyes were unfocused even for a blind man. His swizzle stick was protruding sideways from his hair. He had been scratching his head with it, then forgot it was there. We’d been drinking all of ten minutes.
“I’ve never had diesel fuel before,” he said, looking eager and bright-eyed.
I groaned again and dropped my head to his shoulder. He stroked my nearly bald head while licking the last dregs of Stoli from his glass. I vaguely wondered where the nearest AA meeting was being held. Maybe we could make it a threesome.
Chapter Ten
JOHN ALLAN Davis lived in a rundown apartment building not far from the beautiful Craftsman home where I had met my new prospective clients. Only twelve city blocks separated the two, but in reality it was a universe away. The street where my grieving clients lived was nicely swept, the cars parked along the curbs new and shiny (with the justified exception of the dusty SUV owned by Tommy’s parents), the children well-groomed and riding expensive bikes. Davis’s apartment building faced a pot-holed avenue in the wrong part of town. Here, trash lay in the gutters, and the cars parked along the thoroughfare looked as if they had long ago given up any semblance of self-respect. Battered, grimy, flat tires here and there looked like they had melted in the summer heat. Even the kids were different: unkempt, ragged, screaming good-natured obscenities at one another, and riding around on stripped-down bicycles that barely had any moving parts left.
I imagined Tommy’s father repeatedly driving past Davis’s apartment complex in those first few weeks after tragedy struck, trying to get a glimpse of the man he suspected had killed his son. Trying to understand why the police hadn’t taken him into custody. Trying to pull his life back together after it was so suddenly and viciously torn apart.
Only a few hours earlier, after way too many hours with my mother and after too much alcohol had figuratively flowed under the bridge, I had delivered a tottering Kenny back to his apartment door. When I left him, he was exuberantly singing the theme song to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, with all the yo-hos thrown in on cue and with great exuberance. He nuzzled against my neck as I said my goodbyes. I implored him to go to bed and sleep it off. I also swore up and down I would never ever take him to visit my mother again.
“But I like her!” he cried. Then he tapped an inquisitive finger to the side of his head. “Say, did we ever have brunch? I can’t recall.”
“We had olives.”
He emitted a dainty burp behind his fist. “Oh yes. I remember now. They were good. Your mother’s a good cook.”
“Shut up, Kenny.”
I shuffled him into his bedroom and coaxed him onto the bed. He watched me with sleepy eyes while I pulled off his shoes and pants and shirt, leaving nothing behind but his socks and underwear. When I finished, he gazed down his bare legs toward my general vicinity and asked softly, “Are you going to make love to me now?”
I tossed his clothes aside and squirmed up to the head of the bed, where I bent over and gave him a kiss on the forehead. I stroked his cheek while his eyelids began to droop. “I’m going to let you sleep for a while, baby. When you wake up, you should eat something.”
A lazy smile touched his lips. “I like it when you call me baby.”
“I like it too.”
“Is my cane here?” he asked.
“It’s by your dresser, where you always leave it.”
“You remembered.”
“Yeah.”
Kenny’s breathing evened out, and he seemed to settle into the bed.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I whispered into his ear.
His eyes didn’t open, but the tiny smile returned. “You promise?”
“Yes, Kenny. I absolutely promise.”
“Goody.”
A moment later, after a couple more faintly off-key yo-ho-hos, he was snoring. I quietly picked his clothes up off the floor so he wouldn’t trip on them when he woke. I folded them carefully and placed them on a chair by the closet. I neatly aligned his shoes against the wall where I’d seen him set them before. At the last minute, I returned to the chair and lifted his folded shirt, pressing it to my face so I could breathe in Kenny’s scent. I stared at him over the fabric, still snoring softly on the bed in nothing but underpants and socks. I longed to crawl into bed with him and take him into my arms, but I knew I couldn’t. I had things to do.
My head was thumping, but I had shared brunch with my mother before, so I wasn’t surprised. Having a little food in my stomach would help, so I drove through McDonald’s. I scarfed down several thousand calories of processed meat and lard, then bought an extra bag of lard for Kenny. I returned to his apartment and left the food on his kitchen counter so he’d find it when he woke. I had left his front door unlocked for that very purpose.
That much done, I peeked in to make sure Kenny was still sleeping, then ducked back through the door and locked it securely behind me this time. For no particular reason, I kissed my fingertips and tapped the kiss to the door as I left.
Smiling, even with my thumping head, I headed back to the car.
Now, hours later, after sitting in my car so long that my backside was numb from the twelfth vertebrae down, I gratefully watched the long, long afternoon begin to wane to dusk. I was parked at a curb in the crappy part of town, staring out the driver’s side window, watching John Allan Davis sit all by himself in the side yard of his apartment building, enjoying the shade of a fat palm tree, tossing back a twelve-pack of beer, one right after the other, and dropping the empty bottles in the grass.
Clearly, he had not put his drinking days behind him at all.
While he drank, he worked diligently at one of those beginner’s word search puzzle books. The book was all wrinkled and ratty, like maybe he’d found it on a bus bench somewhere and confiscated it for his own use. While he exercised his problem-solving technique, he poked his tongue through the corner of his mouth and beetled up his forehead, like he was trying to reformulate the Theory of Relativity or something. Obviously, John Allan Davis was not Mensa material.
He wore nothing but a pair of dirty cargo shorts that looked like they hadn’t seen soapy water since the day they came off the sweatshop assembly line in Bangladesh.
I was watching him from a block and a half away through the lenses of my best binoculars. The binoculars worked so well, I could see his skinny, hairless legs and pale, sunken chest, not to mention the grunge embedded deep in his toenails, which I don’t mind admitting made me a little sick to my stomach. There was also a pimple on the side of his neck that looked about ready to pop. I figured he wouldn’t be asked to pose for Playgirl anytime soon.
As always happened on a stakeout, my thoughts took over and whisked me away.
I suspected a new era in my life was beginning. It would be an era of spending too many days surveilling this child-murdering piece of shit parked in the lawn chair in front of me, and too few nights spent happily with Kenny. I imagined Kenny and me laughing our way through energetic
bouts of rowdy sex, or cooing our way through moments of gentler lovemaking. But whatever we did, we would be learning more about each other, and each of us in our own way would be relishing the learning and wondering where we would go from there.
So basically, while I toyed with planning the death of one person, I also mapped out the best way to share my life with another. As much as it amazed me to realize it, I knew already I wanted Kenny to be a part of that life. I wasn’t ready to propose marriage or anything, but God knows I enjoyed being with him. And always, when we were too many hours apart, the time would begin to grate. Like something was missing. Like someone had left the salt off my fries. Or I’d forgotten to don my socks before I slipped into my shoes. At odd times I found myself thinking of Kenny’s strong, expressive hands, which he so often used as eyes. Or I imagined over and over again that intriguing patch of hair around his belly button as it tickled my exploring lips. The taste of his skin on my tongue. The beat of his heart as I laid my ear to his chest. Or the cool crispness of his toes as they dug through the hair on my shin.
As this new era unfolded, I could feel the growing depth of our friendship. My days were spent watching Davis, trying to find an excuse to kill him. My nights were spent watching Kenny, wary that I would see him tiring of me.
ONE WEEK stretched into two.
John Allan Davis sometimes stayed inside his ratty apartment all day, so some days of surveillance were spent staring at nothing. Other times I would spot him dragging his sorry ass down his front steps, heading off to the store up the street. Almost always he would return with either a grocery bag of TV dinners, or an armload of Falstaff in twelve-ounce bottles, which seemed to be his drink of choice. I never saw him go to work. I never saw him interact with anyone else, either in the building or out. He had no friends. No one knocked on his door. Six days a week, he would fumble with a key and unlock his mailbox at the front of the building to retrieve his mail. On warmer days, when his apartment was apparently insufferable, he would sit in the side yard, drinking beer. Sometimes as he drank, he worked in his stupid puzzle book. Sometimes he merely sat there like a lump in the rusty lawn chair, eyes closed, guzzling beer, enjoying the shade and the solitude and presumably contemplating his useless existence.