Mick

by Chris Lynch

  “That I ain’t,” he said. “Actually, I’m Cambodian.”

  I hesitated, even though I was stunned. Until I realized he had to be kidding me. “Funny, you don’t look Cambodian,” I said.

  “Goes to show,” he said, smirking. “You just never can tell.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about—”

  “Game’s over,” Toy cut in.

  I looked at the board. It was a total devastation. I never made it across the fifty-yard line.

  “You have some kind of unslakable thirst for absorbing beatings, huh?”

  “Apparently I do,” I said.

  Monday morning Sully returned from the mono. “So what happened while I was away?” The fat lip Cruz gave me was gone, but the lump I got from Terry and the chair, long and thick like a finger running between the skin and bone on my forehead, was still prominent.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Cool. For you, I’d say nothing happening was a good thing.”

  “Oh, wait a minute. Now that you mention it, a couple of things did happen. I got beat up by five Asian guys, one Cuban, and one psychotic brother. I rescued an old black lady from the foaming jaws of Terry. I fell in love. And I made a new friend at school.”

  Sully looked at me for a few long suspicious seconds. “Bullshit,” he said. “You didn’t make no friends.”

  “I did. I’ll show you.”

  Loitering in front of the corner store across from the school was Toy. He was sitting on a plastic milk crate, a long skinny cherry-smelling cigar sticking out from under the hat. There was about an inch between the brim and the ash.

  “Hey, pig, how ya doin’, man?” Toy asked. I loved it.

  “Him?” Sully said, gesturing with his thumb. “You made one damn friend, and it’s him?”

  “So what’s wrong with me?” Toy said, all cool, letting the cigar smoke just eke out of his nostrils, gather under the brim of his hat, then roll up over the edges.

  “You’re a bigger loser than he is, that’s what,” Sully said, turning the big thumb on me now.

  “Thanks, Sul,” I said.

  “Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you weren’t fine guys. It’s just that, well, you’re like zits, probably harmless but who the hell wants to be seen with ya.”

  Toy went into aggressive ignore-Sully mode. He stuck the cigar into his mouth and let it hang while he talked around it.

  “I’ve been thinking about your lady problem over the weekend. The way to Evelyn is—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Sully jumped in. “Evelyn, Mick? Did I have mono, or friggin’ malaria? Evelyn is the great love you fell into?”

  “Ya, what about it?”

  “About it is this. Of all the many thousands of people who hate your guts, there is nobody who hates them more profoundly than Evelyn does. So unless I’m confused on exactly what the purpose of loving a girl is...”

  “She’s softening.”

  “She’s softening, is she? You use a blowtorch, did ya?”

  I turned to Toy. I had allowed myself to forget how futile this was. Sully was back to remind me. “I don’t know what I’m tryin’ to prove. Sully’s right, I don’t have a prayer.”

  “Of course I’m right,” Sully said, satisfied. “Don’t waste your time. Go out and find a chick who lives a hundred miles away and don’t know anything about you. Then you got a shot. Evelyn, she ain’t your type anyway.”

  “What is it he should object to, Sullivan? Her exquisite beauty or her keen intelligence?” Toy asked.

  Sully looked at me, dropped his chin and gave me the deadpan eyes. “Who is this guy? He needs some slaps, I think. You need some slaps there, pal.”

  “Slap me,” Toy said.

  Sully waved his hand at me like he was demanding money. “Okay, how many slaps we got in petty cash, Mick?”

  I was looking over Sully’s shoulder, down the street. “Uh-oh,” I said. “Speaking of slaps, Sul, did I forget to tell you that Augie was looking for you?”

  The sound of Augie’s name made Sully shut up and look in my eyes. “Ya, you forgot to tell me that little thing.” And when he saw the way I was looking off, what little bit of color he had drained from his face.

  “What are you now, better than the rest of us, Sullivan, you little rat muthuh?”

  Augie had spun Sully around so they were face to face, with me right behind Sul, who was stone frozen.

  “What you been, hidin’? Makin’ me come lookin’ around f’you for weeks.”

  “I... been sick,” Sully said in a small, whimpering kind of voice you usually use on someone who might have a little sympathy. This was the wrong place for it. “I had mononucleosis, Augie.”

  “Shut up, I don’t care what you had. I took that as a personal insult, what you didn’t do there at the parade.” Augie started prodding Sully hard with his finger, poking him with every sentence, pushing him backward. “You can’t throw one measly egg?” Poke. “You forgettin’ who you are?” Poke. He’d now driven Sully back into me and with one finger was poking us both down the sidewalk. “Your buddy there can throw a egg. How come you can’t throw a egg? Ain’t got no quarrel with no Viet Cong, huh, smartass? I think maybe you ain’t got no quarrel with the Irish faggot Americans either.”

  Like the flick of a blade, there was Toy, slicing his way into the sliver of space between Sully and Augie. He’d gone unnoticed, sitting there on the crate, leaning against the storefront. But as soon as he got in there, Augie started his retreat.

  “What the hell do you want?” Augie asked.

  Toy didn’t say a word. The only sound was the click of his square-toe boots on the pavement, taking one step forward for every one Augie took backward.

  “What, Toy, you gonna kill me? You gonna cut me?” Augie said nervously, badly pretending those thoughts didn’t bother him. “C’mon, I ain’t afraid a you,” he said, almost jogging backward.

  How come I didn’t know Toy was that big? He looked now so big, big hands, long legs, square but meaty shoulders. Raw boned is what they’d call him if he was an athlete.

  Sully and I stood on the sidewalk staring, enraptured, still pressed together like Augie had us. “C’mon,” Augie yelled from a distance, “I’ll kick your ass. C’mon.” When the distance between them reached three blocks, Toy stopped following, walked back to where we were. “I’ll kick your ass,” Augie’s tiny, distant voice called.

  When Toy was back, bigger now somehow, sort of hovering over the two of us, and us smaller and stupider than usual, we just stared at him for a few seconds.

  “Okay, I won’t slap you this time,” Sully said.

  “You know Augie, I take it,” I said. “Or at least he knows you.”

  “We better get in,” Toy said, letting the gone-out cigar fall from his lips. “They’re gonna jug me again if I’m late. I can’t have ’em jugging me anymore.”

  Welcome to the Hotel Toxic

  WHAT WAS FUNNY ABOUT the whole Sully-Toy thing was the way they refused to quite warm up to each other, but wouldn’t back away either. They always seemed to be jockeying over something, like whether or not Evelyn and me together was a good idea.

  “Think about it,” Sully said, wagging a very serious finger. “If she really is part Indian, with the Mick here being, well we all know what he is, do you suppose their offspring would be unusually thirsty little buggers?” Such remarks—the kind Sully made all the time—caused Toy to go stone cold, but we always eventually got past it.

  And more and more the three of us spent our discretionary time around school together, with even Sully realizing that being in Toy’s presence was not too bad a place to be.

  “Where do you live, Toy?” Sully asked as we sat on the school steps one afternoon.

  “At home,” Toy said.

  “Very good. But where is that?” We had no idea where Toy was from. Most afternoons we’d hang around in front of school or over at the store for a while, then Toy would go his way and we’d go ours. Not that I thought
about it too much, but really we didn’t know anything about Toy. That was okay by me because I didn’t feel like I needed much. Not Sully, though. He needed much. These things are important to Sul.

  “Why do you need to know?” Toy asked. “What does it matter where I live?”

  I started to figure Toy lived someplace crappy. Crappier even than where we lived. “Back off, Sul,” I said.

  “No,” Toy insisted, “that’s okay. But I want to know, what does stuff like that matter to you?”

  Sully got fidgety, kicking at the steps as he talked, pacing some, tossing pebbles like three pointers into the trash barrel. He likes asking questions a whole lot more than answering them. “I don’t know. It’s just, regular stuff, y’know, background stuff. A guy likes to know things about another guy. You know.”

  “No, I don’t know. Why does a guy like to know things about another guy?” Toy sometimes could tie you up with his blank voice, his Store-24-clerk I-don’t-get-it way of talking. Some of it was real, some of it acting, but all of it was killing Sully.

  “Dammit, Toy, you know what I mean. Like, ‘Toy,’ I mean, what kind of a name is that? Where does it come from? What are you? What are your parents? Y’know?”

  Sully fidgeted faster and faster. The deeper he sank into this thing he was digging, the more he squirmed. Toy sat calmly, hunched, his elbows on his knees, his hands folded in front of his chin. Sully swam like a fish in a tank in front of him. Slowly, Toy started nodding.

  “You do. You do understand,” Sully was thrilled to say.

  Toy continued nodding. “No,” he said.

  “Maybe this is a good time to go,” Sully said, clapping his hands and yanking me up from my spot beside Toy. We started walking, and Toy sat. I didn’t say anything because for the first time all day Sully was right, it was a good time to leave because I thought I could feel Toy tensing up. Something I didn’t think any of us wanted.

  We’d gone about twenty feet down the sidewalk when Toy called us back.

  “What’s up?” I asked when we were back standing in front of him.

  “Ya, come on now, come on now, Toy, we’re pretty busy guys here, places to go, things to do.” I don’t know what Sully was expecting, but he was definitely in no hurry to reengage Toy.

  “You want to see it?” Toy asked.

  “Nah, thanks anyway,” Sully said, though he had no idea what the subject was.

  “See what, Toy?” I asked.

  “Where I live. You want to come? I could show it to you.”

  He almost stuttered it out, he was so bad at this. He was apparently not used to inviting people over, which was okay enough since we weren’t used to being invited.

  And gone was the nervous, bumbling Sul. He was on this like a rat. “Absolutely, man, we’d love to,” he said. Because when it comes to a person’s personals, his vital statistics, Sully is one curious cat.

  We walked, tagging like baby ducks behind Toy as he led us to the places on the far side of the school, where we never go. To the stuff we never see. All our times are spent normally traveling the distance between home and school, and back, no need to make much use of the area east of the wrought-iron school-yard fence. There was just nothing there. We either played at home, the region around Sycamore that no longer included Sycamore, or we went into town, taking the train to zoom through all this on the other side of the school without ever looking at it because, like I said, there’s nothing there.

  But the checkerboard squares, spoking out of either side of Centre Street, looked a lot like it did on my side. We walked through the black section, closest to the school, past two playgrounds filled to capacity with kids and throbbing music and adult guys in basketball games where somebody crashed hard into the chain-link fence every ten seconds. There was food cooking somewhere, something spicy and ricey, and every time I’d smell it I’d hear laughs and West Indian accents.

  He took us past the small Southeast Asian community, which was like a wall of silence thrown up against the buzz of the nearest streets and I wanted to hurry through because I felt like everybody still recognized me from you-know-what and they were all quiet because they were plotting something special for me.

  The cars. The Dominican-Cuban-Puerto Rican neighborhood blew me away with the love of their cars that looked to me like something out of Daytona and Indianapolis. I think half the cars were opened up, jacked into the sky, guts half spilled onto the sidewalk, and for every Toyota and Mazda and Chevy there were three men laboring to bring it back to life while their kids played soccer in the street between them.

  We didn’t know how many worlds, like Mario Brothers, Toy was going to take us through, until we came to the end of the end of the world. It’s what people around here, at least the people who talk in front of me, which of course means the Bloody’s kind of people, it’s what they call No Man’s Land. It was where the so-called mongrels of the city wound up when they landed here. Transients. Sicko life-stylers. Newer waves of non-English-speaking immigrants like Russians and Slavs with no community in place and other folks who just weren’t looking for any damn community.

  It was a working waterfront, on the edge of a canal, skinny houses sandwiched between frozen fish packing plants and big produce wholesalers. Why was it that all you could smell were the bad fish, and the bad vegetables? Where the city just dropped into the bay or the bay dumped into the city and travelers legal or not jumped off boats and said, “This is it, this is home now,” settling into one of the million roachy rental units within a spit of the pier. This was where Toy lived.

  We approached Toy’s place, a brick building one block long but with each segment painted a different color to pretend they were different houses. On the sidewalk, covering the sidewalk so you had to walk into the gutter to get around it, was a motorcycle. A whole lot of motorcycle. It was a Harley-Davidson police model, fully dressed, midnight blue with tiny silver star sparkles in it and the word respect written in ultra fine white script along the teardrop gas tank. Attached to it was a double piggyback sidecar. Automatically the three of us stopped and stared at the bike like we’d never seen anything like it before because, at least for Sully and me, we never had. Not so for Toy, though.

  “That’s my old man’s,” he said, the smile spreading wide despite his effort to cool it. “Sometimes I get to take it out myself.”

  If he wasn’t lying, and I got the impression that Toy was one of those rare guys who never had to make stuff up, then he was now bigger than ever. Immense. I noticed Sully doing exactly what I was doing, running his eyes back from Toy to the bike, from the bike to Toy, getting it all together. It would take a major man to ride that machine, not just because it was huge and heavy, but because it had bigness, wildness all its own that no mortal high school kid could dream of tackling. If Toy could handle that...

  I believed him.

  “Come on up,” he said as he pushed open the narrow door into the dark hallway. We walked up to the second floor where the landing forked into two apartment entrances before the stairway continued on up to the third and fourth floors. “You’ll like my father,” Toy said as he turned the old skeleton key, wiggling it around in the loose lock. “He’s a little rough, but he’s an all right guy.”

  Toy pushed open the door to give us all a full-on view of the sofa, where his big, black-bearded father sat facing the door shirtless, his legs spread out over the coffee table, one boot kicked off, his large pewter skull belt buckle dangling off a sofa cushion. He was squeezing two similarly barebacked women to his hairy chest. There was a lot of sweat on Toy’s dad, a heavy man. There was a lot of sweat in the air, too. When we came in the women pulled closer in to him, covering up, refusing to turn even their faces. “Make them go,” one whispered.

  Toy’s voice came out slow, low, measured. “I should have called. I thought maybe we’d do some barbecue.”

  We had already started back down the stairs when Toy’s father’s voice followed us, deep and loud without his even yel
ling. Most definitely, the voice of the owner of that motorcycle. “We could do that, Toy. Come on, come on back up.”

  “Nah, don’t worry about it,” Toy said without breaking stride. “It was my fault, I should have called.” He sounded a little disappointed, a little guilty, but that was it.

  Back we went, through the neighborhoods, nobody talking, Sully and me staring at Toy’s back, then dumbly at each other.

  “You come to my house,” I heard myself say. It was one of those situations where you just have to say something or you’re all going to explode with the tension, so under pressure you say the stupidest thing you can think of. I could read from the glee on Sully’s face that that’s what I’d done.

  “Ya? Me too?” Sully asked.

  Having already defeated myself, all I could do was nod as I flashed forward to feeding my first new friend since probably first grade to my family.

  Not that my mother wasn’t as surprised as Toy’s dad to see me strolling in with not one but two dinner guests, but she was also a little thrilled about it.

  “Certainly, certainly,” Ma said, “we can always stretch. Sit, boys, sit.”

  I winced as I asked, picturing my mother “stretching” a Swanson’s Hungry Man Dinner, peeling back the foil, slicing down the Salisbury steak, scooping out half of the little dollop of mashed potatoes to make two demi-dollops.

  “Fish cakes,” she chirped. “I’ll pop open another can of beans and we’ll be all set.”

  I breathed a little lighter. She always made about thirty fish cakes because my father went nuts for them. So tonight he’d have to settle for a dozen or so, which I didn’t feel too guilty about.

  “Isn’t this nice,” Ma said as she took her place at the table. She sat on one side, next to Sully, while Toy and I sat across from them. At one end of the table was an empty chair with food piled high in front of it—fish cakes stacked like tires, molasses-drenched baked beans oozing all over, and McCain’s alphabet french fries. Because my father comes in promptly at six o’clock every night, give or take five minutes, and he likes to hit the ground running, supperwise. At the opposite end of the table was an empty seat with no plate. Because Terry comes home at the same time too, give or take a week.