by P. E. Ryan
“Ashley!” her mom snapped. “What have I told you about rudeness?”
“I’m not being rude. I’m just asking.”
“Because,” Mike said with a set to his own mouth that was half smile, half frown, “with the right treatment, they can live long and fairly comfortable lives. And they can be observed so that we can learn more about their ‘gross’ disease.” He glanced at Garth, as if imploring him to dive in.
“Everyone deserves a chance,” Garth said.
“What’s on your nose?” the girl asked him.
“Shoe polish.”
“That’s dumb.”
“What’s dumb,” Garth said as Tuva wound her leash around his legs, “is putting a dog to sleep just because it’s not in perfect health. How would you like it if you got sick, and then someone killed you instead of giving you medicine?”
“Ha-ha,” Mike said, clapping his hands together. “Let’s not go overboard.”
The dad glanced at his watch. “We’ve got to get moving if we’re going to make it to your sister’s place for lunch.”
“Okay,” the mom said. “Come on, Miss Sass Mouth. Boys, leave those dogs alone.”
The five of them continued on into the store. Just as she was passing through the double doors, the girl turned around and stuck her tongue out. Garth stepped free of the lasso Tuva had made and thrust out his own tongue.
With his hands in the pockets of his trousers, Mike strolled over to where he was standing. He gazed at the asphalt for a moment, then said, “Let’s review.”
“Let’s not.”
“We’re trying to make money.”
“I know.”
“We’re trying to be charming.”
“And cute, yeah. I get it.”
“So let’s keep the conversation steered away from the euthanasia of our potential donors, shall we?”
One town over, adjacent to the food court of a strip mall, a frizzy-haired woman in a white sack dress offered to adopt all three dogs on the spot. “I’m an animal fanatic,” she told them. “I have four dogs already. Plus six cats, two cockatiels, and a potbellied pig. All of them are named after presidents.” She sat right down on the pebbled cement and corralled Hutch into her lap. “A-look at you. A-look. So old and wise and still a little scruff-a-muffin. I’m going to name you Rutherford B. Hayes.”
“Actually,” Mike said, “we aren’t at liberty to let go of these guys. The cost of their medication and treatment is exorbitant, and it would hardly be fair to any one individual to shoulder the burden—”
“I’m rich,” the woman said. Her lipstick, Garth noticed, was purple. Her pale gray eyes were ringed with blue eye shadow and were opened just a fraction too wide, making her look perpetually startled. She hugged Hutch and rocked back and forth. “Dot com money. My husband made a fortune before he and his lover were abducted.”
Mike cut Garth a glance. “Abducted?”
“That’s right, scruff-a-muffin,” she said, as if Hutch had asked the question. She kissed the top of the dog’s head three times. “Carried away by aliens. For experiments.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Mike said.
“I’m not.” She raised her head and gave him a wide smile, then motioned for Garth to bring Tuva over. Garth hesitated, then stepped sideways so that Tuva, on her leash, could reach her. “You,” she told Tuva, pinching one of the dog’s ears, “are the scroochiest little mop I’ve ever laid eyes on. Do you want to come live with me? Be Grover Cleveland?”
“That’s very generous on your part,” Mike told her. “And your…presidential menagerie sounds impressive. But, really, we can’t let these dogs go.”
“I’ll buy them,” the woman said. The declaration sounded more like a statement of fact than an offer. “Name your price.”
Garth waited for Mike’s response. When he heard nothing, he looked over and saw the concentrated, calculating expression on his uncle’s face. He was studying the woman, sizing her up.
He seemed to be considering her offer.
“Well?” she asked
“They’re not for sale!” Garth blurted out.
The woman smiled at him. “Everything is for sale. Look here.” She set Hutch aside, stood up, and opened her purse. To his astonishment, she pulled out a roll of money as big as her fist. “Three dogs: one, two, three,” she said, peeling off three hundred-dollar bills.
“Who said anything about a price?” Garth asked.
“Not enough? Four, five, six.”
Mike rubbed a hand over his mouth as he stared at the money.
“You’re crazy,” Garth said.
“I can afford to be,” the woman said.
“Why don’t you just go to a shelter? You could adopt dogs right and left.”
“Because when I see something I like, I want to have it. And I like these dogs.” She peeled off another hundred.
Garth glared at Mike, who seemed transfixed by the sight of the money. When he spoke again, it wasn’t to the woman, but to Garth.
“Of course not Hutch. But the other two…?” He shrugged and glanced down at Tuva and Mr. Smith.
“No!” Garth snapped, not caring if the woman overheard. “What am I supposed to tell Ms. Kessler? That they were abducted by aliens?”
“It happens,” the woman said.
“You can’t buy these dogs,” Garth told her. “Not for any price. I don’t know why you’d want them, anyway; they’ve got meninosis.”
“Tropolitis,” Mike corrected.
“Whatever. They’re not for sale.”
The smile never left the woman’s face. Her gaze drifted from Mike to Garth, then back to Mike, as if trying to determine whether or not he had veto power.
Mike shrugged again and said, “Sorry, lady. He’s calling the shots.”
Her blue-ringed eyes made one last drift: to Garth, his blackened nose, the nylon Scooby-Doo ears riding on top of his head. “A dog calling the shots,” she said. “And you tell me I’m crazy.”
A moment later, the money was back in her purse and she was wandering into the food court.
“Today went pretty well,” Mike said on their way home from the shelter.
Garth was back in his T-shirt and shorts. Hutch was stretched out across the backseat, glad, it seemed, to have it to himself again.
“I thought we’d at least get something out of that woman after she waved all that cash around,” Mike said. “Didn’t you?”
Garth didn’t say anything.
“What do you think the chances are that she bumped off her husband and his ‘lover’?”
“No idea.”
They turned onto Floyd, nearing the apartment. In his peripheral vision Garth saw Mike glance over at him, waiting for more.
After a moment, Mike said, “She was certifiable, wasn’t she? I think she actually believed you were a dog. To your credit, I guess—though I have to say your heart didn’t seem to be in it.”
“My heart? I was dressed like Scooby-friggin’-Doo! How the hell was my heart supposed to be in it?”
“Yeow. Didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”
“It’s got nothing to do with my nerve! It’s embarrassing, Mike. I’m not ten years old, you know? Why don’t you wear the costume next time?” As soon as he said the words, Garth wanted to take them back; he didn’t want there to be a next time.
“No offense, but I’m too big. We’re doing this for you and your mom, remember?”
“You keep saying that,” Garth muttered. “You actually would have sold them, wouldn’t you? Tuva and Mr. Smith?”
“Don’t you want them to find good homes?”
“Yes, but they don’t belong to you! They belong to the shelter! If anyone should get paid for them, it’s Ms. Kessler. She shelled out for their shots and has been putting them up all this time. I wouldn’t want them living with that crazy lady, anyway!”
Mike hesitated, then shook his head—a little too vigorously, Garth thought. “No. I wouldn’t want that, eit
her. Of course I wouldn’t have actually sold them. I was just trying to string her along to see if we could get a donation. She obviously had money to burn, and it would have been nice if things had gone a little differently.”
Garth didn’t feel like being chastised. “How much did we make, anyway?”
“I haven’t counted it yet, but I’d say we neared four or five hundred today.”
“And where are we keeping all this money?”
“It’s safe. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be holding on to it. If your mom found it she’d put a stop to things, pronto.”
“I wasn’t asking to hold it. I was just asking where it is.”
“You trust me, right?” He sighed as he pulled up in front of their building. “Look, I hear the frustration in your voice. I do. So…I take it you’re not too interested in doing this again tomorrow?”
Garth glared at him.
“Okay, okay. Fine. We’ll move on. Tell you what, I’ve got another idea in the works—just one more, and it should go pretty smoothly. It’s genius, in fact. A sure thing. We’ll do that, put all the money together, and then tell your mom the lotto ship came in. Hey—” He glanced over again and tapped the end of his nose.
“What does that mean? That we’re both on the same page? Because I’m not really feeling very ‘same page’ at the moment.”
“No. It means you’ve got a little tropolitis on your face.”
Garth snatched down the mirrored sun visor, and dragged a hand over the shoe polish.
11
The kitchen radio was tuned to an eighties rock station. His mom was tossing a salad at the counter while Mike, in the middle of one of his stories, made hamburger patties over the sink.
Garth eyed them for a moment, making sure neither one of them seemed on the verge of leaving the kitchen. Then he ducked down the hall to the back of the apartment and slipped into Mike’s room.
He didn’t feel like asking if he could borrow the cell phone. He didn’t feel like hearing any more encouragement—as if, without sufficient nudging from some outside source, he would never in a million years be able to do this on his own.
Draped across the foot of the daybed were the jeans Mike had been wearing earlier. Garth pressed his hands against the pockets and found the phone.
He slipped out onto the porch. Then, just to make sure he was out of earshot, he walked down the steps and followed the sidewalk away from the house.
The number was still tucked into his wallet. He dialed it with his heartbeat thumping against his eardrums.
“Hello?”
“Adam?”
“That’s me.”
Talk. Articulate. Sound human. “Hi. It’s Garth.”
“Hey!” The voice sounded so glad to hear from him, he felt himself blush. “How’s it going? I was wondering if you were ever going to call me back.”
“Oh, yeah, I totally was. I mean, I’ve been wanting to. I’ve just been so busy these past few days.”
“Yeah? What’s up?”
Garth didn’t really have anything to follow through with, other than the same lies he’d been feeding his mom and, to lesser effect, Lisa. Stick to the truth as much as possible, he told himself. “Oh, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my uncle. You know…going here and there, doing a little of this, a little of that.”
God, he sounded like Mike the night he’d first arrived—all that vagueness.
With what sounded like genuine interest, Adam asked, “What’s ‘a little of this, a little of that’?”
So much for the truth. “Mike’s become obsessed with Civil War memorabilia,” he heard himself say. “Turns out he’s a real American history freak. So we’ve been going to practically every place you can think of. We even drove out to one of the old plantation houses, and walked a few battleground sites.”
Adam then made the conversation twice as awkward—and made Garth feel twice as guilty—by asking questions about the plantation house: How big was it? Was it still in good shape? Did it look like Tara in Gone with the Wind? Garth made up as much as he could. As he did, he caught himself glancing up and down the sidewalk and at the windows of the surrounding houses, as if some neighbor might pop out of nowhere and challenge him on this litany of lies.
“Hey,” Adam asked, “is it just Mike who’s got the Civil War appetite, or are you a secret freak yourself?”
“I’m into it to a certain extent,” he lied. “Sort of. I mean, I know a fair amount. So what have you been up to?”
“Vegging, mostly. I went back to the river, went to a couple of movies. Oh—and I read this great book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, all about American filmmaking in the seventies. Also, I’m trying to get the hang of this new editing software. It’s a lot trickier than I thought it was going to be.”
“You must get a lot done when you’re not vegging.”
“That I do.”
“Um—big plans for the weekend?”
“My granddad’s driving over from Charlottesville on Saturday. He’s a total kook—but in a good way. He’s basically a kid who never grew up.”
Like Mike, Garth thought. Then: No, probably not like Mike at all.
There was a long pause of dead air between them—broken only by a car horn farther down the street.
“Where are you?” Adam asked.
“Outside. I was going for a walk and Mike let me borrow his phone. I keep meaning to tell you the reason I haven’t gotten around to giving you my number: we just have the one phone—me and my mom, I mean—and she’s on it a lot, she’s a total chatterbox. There’d almost be no point in giving you the number. We don’t have call waiting or voicemail,” he added. Lie upon lie upon lie. When was his mom ever on the phone—unless it was to talk to his grandmother or to take a call from work? “Anyway”—Do it, he told himself, take the plunge—“do you maybe want to hang out sometime over the next few days?”
“Yeah,” Adam said, “I’d like that. What have you got going on?”
Suddenly, he remembered Mike telling him to keep Saturday open. The next scam, he presumed. The last one. “A bunch of boring old chores,” he said. “But maybe one day next week, after your granddad leaves?”
“Sure. Or Friday evening. You could come over, if you want. We could watch a movie at my place. On my laptop—not the greatest viewing screen, but it’s the only way I can watch stuff in my room.”
“Friday’s great!” Garth said, sounding a little more excited than he’d intended.
“Okay. Ever seen Chinatown?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s a classic,” Adam said. “I own it. I watch it every few months.”
“You’re not sick of it?”
Adam chuckled. “Actually, I’m due for a fix.”
“Sounds good. You can educate me on classic cinema. I only really know crappy cinema.”
“Well, I don’t know squat about the Civil War, so you can educate me on that. If I get some big studio deal—not—I’ll hire you as a consultant.”
“Well, that would definitely make you the coolest boss I’ve ever had.”
“Oh, I’d be a monster. I’d scream through clouds of cigar smoke and throw coffee mugs across the set.”
“I doubt that.” He stood on the sidewalk feeling practically giddy about Friday, and yet the lies—even more so than the humid evening air—made him feel sticky. He glanced at the clock on the phone. Dinner would be ready soon. He asked Adam for his address, told him he had to run, and they said good-bye.
The following afternoon, Mike drove him out to the warehouse district beyond Shockoe Bottom. It was a desolate area; many of the warehouses looked abandoned, their doors padlocked and rusted, their windows broken into shards like mouths of jagged teeth.
“Is this the part where you bump me off?” Garth asked, eyeing one particularly creepy-looking building with a dozen NO TRESPASSING signs bolted to it.
“No. We have greater plans for you, Mr. Bond.”
“Like what?”
“Lunch,” Mike said, and took the next corner, turning them onto a street so marred with potholes that the Camaro scraped bottom.
Half a jostling block later, they were parked in front of a pale little stucco and shingle building called The Single Slice. A man holding a lit cigarette sat sound asleep on a folding chair in front of the window. A fat, gray cat lay stretched out on the pitched roof, licking one of its paws. “We’re eating here?” Garth asked.
“Best pizza in town.”
“How do you even know about this place?”
“I found it last Saturday night when I was taking my drive. And I’m kidding, of course; it’s not the best pizza. In fact, you probably shouldn’t touch anything while we’re in here—not with your bare skin, anyway. I’ll take you for a proper lunch when we’re done.”
“But why are we here?”
“The last hurrah? This Saturday?” Mike put the car in park, turned off the engine, and opened his door. “We’re going to need some help.”
The inside of The Single Slice (a name that made Garth think of a fatal knife wound) was dark and smelled of grease. There were people eating and drinking in a few wooden booths that lined the left-hand wall, and several more slumped over the bar on the opposite side consuming sloppy-looking pizza slices, plates of fries, and cocktails.
“Oh my god,” Garth said under his breath. “It’s the trash pocket, only for people instead of rats.”
“What are you talking about?” Mike said. “A rat would be perfectly happy here.” He walked straight into the middle of the place, then sat down at a small table and motioned for Garth to join him.
Garth did, hesitantly easing down into a wooden chair stained with what he could only hope was tomato sauce.
A jukebox in the corner was leaking one of those long-highway-back-to-you songs that seemed to go on forever. In fact, it played three times in a row before a large, hairy man in a Black Sabbath T-shirt emerged from the kitchen and kicked the machine with his boot, prompting the song to switch to something louder though no less upbeat. He asked what they wanted, and before Garth could speak Mike said, “Two Cokes.”