by P. E. Ryan
“Yup,” the man said without looking at them, and walked down to one end of the bar.
The drinks came: two unopened cans, which seemed safe enough. Garth wiped the rim of his can on his T-shirt sleeve, cracked it open, and took a sip. Mike didn’t touch his, but kept his eye on the bar. Finally (four revolutions of the current song on the jukebox, by Garth’s count), he said, “There she is,” and eased back in his chair, smiling.
Garth followed his gaze. A woman had appeared behind the bar—a girl, really: blond and very pretty, in an aqua tube top with matching plastic bracelets. She looked too nice, Garth thought, to be in a place like this. But she seemed capable of holding her own. One of the customers sitting at the bar was trying to set his drink on fire with a cigarette lighter. She pulled a flyswatter from a nail in the wall and smacked him on the hand.
“Damn, Jackie,” the man said. His lighter had fallen into his drink. “Look what you made me do!”
“Tough eggs,” she said. “It’s against the law.”
“Suppose you and I go do something legal tonight?”
“Suppose you say something unstupid for once in your life, huh? I believe I’d rupture an organ from the shock.”
She either winked or semisnarled at the man; Garth couldn’t tell which. But she didn’t look mad, and neither did he.
Garth looked at Mike, who was watching Jackie. Mike couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her, and couldn’t get the smile off his face.
“Is she why we’re here?” Garth asked.
“She’s part of the reason, if I’m worth my weight in character assessment. Listen”—he finally broke his stare, leaning forward to speak low to Garth over the table—“I’m going to invite her to join us, talk to her for a minute. Go along with whatever I say, okay?” He caught Jackie’s attention and motioned her toward the empty chair at their table.
To Garth’s amazement, she came over and sat down between them.
Mike’s grin had broadened into a full-fledged, rarely seen smile. She smiled back to a lesser degree, and said in a friendly but knowing voice, “You two are off your regular path, aren’t you?”
“We are,” Mike told her. “But we’re glad to be here. Do you remember me from the other night?”
She squinted at him with what almost seemed to be a mocking amount of seriousness. Then her face brightened. “You’re Mister Vodka and Tonic minus the vodka!”
“That’s me.”
“You gave me your card.”
“I did.”
“And who’s this?”
Mike introduced Garth as both his nephew and sidekick.
“Well, well, well,” Jackie said. “What brings you back?”
“You,” Mike said. “I told you, you’re just what I have in mind for this job I’m putting together.”
“You told me I might be just what you had in mind. You told me you were still looking.”
“Either the tonic was going to my head or I’m a fool.”
She dropped her gaze to the table, still smiling. “What are you saying?”
Garth looked at Mike. “What are you saying?”
Mike ignored him and leaned into Jackie. “The same thing I said before.”
“That you’re a promoter and a model scout?”
“Yep. And?”
“That I had model looks.”
“Specifically…”
A little burst of laughter escaped her mouth and she dipped her head to one side. “A perfect nose.”
“That’s right. And I should have just sealed the deal right then, but like I said, I’m a fool. So you remember what we talked about? The one-day, one-shot-deal job this weekend?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it turns out that that job could lead to something else once this drive kicks into full gear, but regardless, the company wants you for Saturday based solely on the head shot you gave me, and that alone says a lot about your potential.”
She was blushing, Garth thought, though it wasn’t so easy to tell in the bar’s dim lights.
“What’s it called again?” she asked.
“‘Grand Slammin’ Wheels for Life.’”
“No, I mean the sickness.”
“Lepicarthia. There’ll probably be media coverage,” Mike told her. “You might end up with your picture in the paper, on top of it all. So what do you say?”
She didn’t say anything for a few moments. She was listening to the song, or maybe replaying in her mind all the horrible things Mike had told her about what lepicarthia inflicts on its victims. Or maybe she was just thinking about the sum of money he’d told her she’d earn.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll do it.”
“Aces,” Mike told her. “Saturday at ten sharp, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“I’ll be back in just a few minutes, you two,” Mike said, then got up from the table and strolled casually down to the last booth, where a man with slicked-back hair and a bloated, tomato-red face sat hunched over a mug of beer and a shot glass.
The man barely looked up when Mike sat down across from him. But Mike started talking to him in a low voice, the sound drowned out by the jukebox, and before long the man was rocking back and forth and nodding his head yes.
Jackie was looking at Garth with wide, polite eyes. Garth felt almost frightened, sitting next to her. But of what? Not anything she was going to do to him, certainly. Maybe frightened of what Mike had in store for her. Frightened of how mortified he’d feel if he were taking part in a scam that would rope in this stranger.
If? Who am I kidding?
He shoved a smile onto his face.
“You’re one lucky guy to have an uncle like that,” she said.
He swallowed. He felt himself nodding with nothing to say, and forced himself to speak. “He’s…unique, all right.”
“One of a kind. He helps out a lot of people, from what he tells me. A lot of girls who move on to bigger things, bigger places. He told me you’ve been interning with him this summer,” Jackie said.
Yes, I’ve been interning at the School for Young Hucksters, under the tutelage of headmaster Mike Rudd. What do you have to do to get in, you ask? Be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And have no spine whatsoever. Oh, and if you can manage it, check your conscience at the door.
Mike came back to the table where Garth was scissoring his knees up and down and pushing dents into his Coke can.
“Who’s that guy?” Garth asked, glancing at the man in the booth.
“Nobody,” Mike said, and to Jackie, “Till Saturday.” He shook her hand, then turned it over, brought it to his lips, and kissed it.
She laughed and said, “Till Saturday.”
Garth pushed up from his chair, glad to be leaving The Single Slice and hoping never to lay eyes on it again.
“So,” he said when they were back in the car, “what exactly are we doing on Saturday?”
“Don’t worry about it. This one’s going to be a piece of cake. What’s happening on the Adam front?”
“I’m going over to his place tomorrow night. We’re going to watch Chinatown.”
“That’s great!”
“Yeah. I guess I’ll just tell Mom I’m hanging out with a friend.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Mike said, and then he slipped into a bad Chinese accent. “‘Bad for glass, bad for glass.’”
Whatever that meant. “Adam told me it’s a classic.”
“It is, most definitely. Classic. So how about that Jackie? I know you bat for the other team, but if you didn’t, she’d be worth stepping up to the plate for, huh?”
“Sure,” Garth muttered. He was already regretting that their paths had crossed with hers, and he caught himself wondering, as the warm breeze swirled around inside the car, what his summer might have been like if Mike had never decided to peel off I-95 at the Richmond exit that evening that felt so long ago.
12
After dinner the next evening, he got up from the table
, stretched, and announced that he was going over to Lisa’s to “hang out.”
Mike wiped his napkin over his mouth and winked at him. His mom—who, thankfully, hadn’t seen the wink—glanced at the clock on the wall. “Don’t stay out too late.”
“It’s summer,” he reminded her. “It’s Friday.”
“I still don’t want you staying out till all hours.”
“If I stayed out till ‘all hours,’ it would mean I never came home.”
“And sarcasm will keep you from walking out the front door in the first place.”
Mike leaned back in his chair, watching the two of them.
“Well, give me a cutoff time, then,” Garth said. “So I know when to be home by.”
She looked at the clock again. “Eleven.”
“How about midnight?”
“We’re not negotiating. I’m the parent.” But she seemed to think about it for a moment and countered, “Eleven thirty.”
“Eleven thirty,” he repeated. “Deal.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Mike said. “How teenagers can do nothing for hours at a time? I can’t imagine how a person could occupy himself just sitting around doing nothing.”
“I think you can,” Garth’s mom told him.
Score one for Mom, Garth thought, and walked out of the kitchen before anything else could be said.
In his room, he threw on a T-shirt, and ran a brush through his hair. He’d decided his motto for the evening was “Expect nothing.” If he obsessed over his appearance, it would be a surefire method of guaranteeing that Adam wouldn’t care at all.
Expect nothing, and the evening just might have a chance at surprising them both.
The tip of the weaselly little man’s knife blade slid just a quarter of an inch up one of Jake Gittes’s nostrils. Garth braced himself, sitting next to Adam on the bed. Then the hand pulled away and took the knife with it, and a ribbon of blood sprayed from Jake Gittes’s nose.
“Ooohhh!” Garth’s entire body jerked and he brought his hands to his eyes to try to block the image. “Ow! Ouch!”
Laughing, Adam made a playful grab for his nose. “Now you’ve seen the most famous nostril-cutting scene in American cinema.”
“Okay.” Garth turned his head away from the laptop, which sat on the bed just beyond their feet. “Tell me there’s no more…splicing and dicing…and I’ll be fine.”
“No more, I promise. Car chases and gunfire, yes. But no more splicing.”
“Thank you.”
The bedroom—slightly larger than Garth’s—had two windows that looked out over Colonial Street, but Adam had drawn the shades. The sun was down now, and the flickering computer screen was the room’s only illumination. Garth’s eyes roamed the walls, hungry for details about Adam. There were snapshots stuck into the frame of the dresser mirror, but they were too far away to see clearly. A bookcase filled with books and DVD’s, but he couldn’t make out any of the titles. On one side of the closet hung a poster for a film called Blue (that much he could read), and on the other side was a poster for The Piano.
Someone tapped on the door, which was pulled to but not latched.
“Come in,” Adam said, pausing the movie.
Mr. Walters stuck his head into the room. He was a trim, stern-looking man who, when he’d met Garth earlier that evening, had pumped his hand vigorously and looked him squarely in the eye as if the two of them were about to make a business deal. According to Adam, his dad took himself and most every other topic on earth extremely seriously. There were deep creases in his forehead to prove it, and his hair—the same blond as Adam’s—was thinning at the crown.
“Everything okay in here?” Mr. Walters asked.
“Yeah,” Adam said. “We’re great.”
“I thought I heard someone yell.”
“That was Garth, hollering in solidarity with Jack Nicholson’s nose.”
“Ah.” Mr. Walters smiled for a fraction of a second; then his expression leveled off, and he glanced around the room as if taking inventory. “Your mom has a migraine. She’s gone to bed early.”
“Okay.”
“Open or closed?” he asked, moving the door back and forth a few inches.
“Closed, I guess, if Mom’s in bed. We don’t want to disturb her.”
“Good thinking.” Mr. Walters pulled his head back into the hall and eased the door shut behind him.
“Should we finish the movie some other time?” Garth asked, lowering his voice and motioning toward the laptop. “If your mom has gone to bed…”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Adam said. “I can translate for you. My dad didn’t knock on the door because you yelled; he knocked on the door to see what we were doing.”
“Because…”
“Because he thinks it’s what he’s supposed to do, as a dad. Check in. Eyeball the place. Make sure we’re not in here doing drugs or starting a cult. And the thing about my mom having a migraine? That means they had an argument. Not a knockdown, drag-out—they never have those, thankfully—but they had some kind of spat. So he’s in the living room getting his crime show fix, and she’s in their bedroom, which is as far away from him as she can get and still be in the house. She’s probably reading or watching television in there, but either way, we won’t disturb her.”
“Okay,” Garth said hesitantly.
“And the whole ‘open or closed’ thing was his way of saying, ‘It’s okay that you, my unfortunately gay son, have your unfortunately gay friend over, but just know that I know it and that I’m generously—and unfortunately—allowing it.’”
“Wow.”
“Honestly. He wants credit for not having a problem with who I am, even if he does sort of have a problem with it.”
“So should I…not be here?”
“No! You should. There are a lot of games with my dad. A lot of little signals the rest of the world is supposed to get and process and respond to accordingly. It’s part of what my parents argue about: my mom gets sick of trying to guess what he wants and misreading his signals.”
“You don’t seem to have any trouble reading them!”
“Yeah, well, I think my problem is that I read too much into them.” He waved the topic away. “Sorry. I’ll stop complaining about my dad now.”
“I told you, it doesn’t bother me. I’d probably have complaints about my dad, if he were still around. Do you guys ever talk about…you?”
“You mean, do we talk about my being gay?”
Garth nodded.
“Twice, I think. No, make that three times. The time I came out to them, the time I brought it up again…oh, and the time I brought it up again. I think he wants a medal for not having disowned me, but if I never mentioned it again from now till the day I died, he’d be very happy. Thankfully, my mom’s not so skittish about it.”
“Like mine is.”
“Your mom’s not seeing the situation in a new light, with your uncle around?”
“Um, no. She didn’t even like the fact that I came out to him. And she still doesn’t know he took me to the bookstore.”
“Sorry to be blunt, but that sucks. I sort of thought having such a cool, open-minded guy in the house might have an effect on her.”
If anything, she seems a little more worried than normal, Garth thought, and with good reason.
They turned back to the movie. Jake Gittes was now glaring at Evelyn Mulwray, half his face hidden behind a large white bandage. Just by his eyes alone you could tell he was thoroughly unhappy. “And Mrs. Mulwray, I damned near lost my nose,” he sneered. “And I like it. I like breathing through it.”
“Great movie, by the way,” Garth said. “Sorry—I mean, film.”
“You can call it a movie. I’m not a snob.”
“How about ‘cinema’? Do people still say that with a straight face?”
“Yes, but that’s the place where they show the movies. And the talkies. And the picture shows. We’ll have you up to speed in no time.”
The Los Angeles sky brightened their faces momentarily; then night fell over the screen once again, and the beautiful old cars rolled through the dusk into Chinatown. For as hard as he tried, Garth couldn’t follow the story line; it just couldn’t compete with his proximity to this incredibly hot guy.
Did I touch you or did you touch me?
Are we even on the same page here?
IS THIS A DATE?
He was afraid to move. He ached to know. Suddenly, the prolonged blare of a car horn filled the room, and then Jake was pulling Evelyn Mulwray off the steering wheel, and Evelyn Mulwray had a hole in her head big enough for one of Mr. Peterson’s rats to crawl into.
“That doesn’t make you flinch?” Adam asked him incredulously.
“Actually, no,” Garth said. “Maybe because they didn’t actually show her getting shot.”
“Forget about it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” a man said, and Garth realized the film was ending.
He relished the connection between their shoulders an instant longer. Then Adam broke it, leaning forward to stop the DVD.
Abruptly, the room became twice as dark as it had been. The window shades glowed from the light of the streetlamps. Adam’s light blue T-shirt seemed to glow as well. With one hand, he opened up his iTunes and scrolled down through a list of songs; with the other, he rubbed at the back of his neck.
Garth watched him from behind. The sudden silence felt awkward.
But then Adam made his selection, and a drum was struck—faintly, as if from a great distance—and a bagpipe leaked out of the tiny speakers. A singer’s voice, raspy and yet somehow smooth, joined the instruments, encircling and drawing them in. Completing them. The combination was beautiful.