Paul nods.
– Supercharger.
George nods.
– Definitely a supercharger situation.
Andy whips his head from side to side, tries to hold his hands up in front of him to keep them away, but clutches his aching sides instead.
– Nuhhhooo! Nuhooo!
Hector turns the joint around and puts the cherry inside his mouth, puffing his cheeks, while Paul and George take hold of Andy. He puts his face close to Andy’s and blows. A thick stream of smoke jets from the tip of the joint.
Andy wheezes most of it in through his flaring nostrils and gaping mouth, instantly choking.
They release him and he doubles over, coughing and laughing and sneezing, ropes of drool and wads of snot hitting the concrete floor of the garage.
George pounds him on his back.
– Don’t puke, man, that would be a breach of good taste.
Still bent over, Andy reaches back and slaps his brother away, the giggles fading as he gags a few more times.
Hector has taken the joint from his mouth. He blows some ash off the cherry.
– Looks like the supercharger did the trick.
Paul is laughing now, near silent hisses that slip in and out of his open mouth.
George looks at him.
– It’s catching. Lightweightness is catching.
Andy is straightening, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
– You guys are dicks, I thought I was gonna choke to death.
Paul slaps the toolbench, mouth still hanging open, tiny seal barks coming from the back of his throat.
George points at him.
– Supercharger, man?
Paul bends, puts his forehead against the top of the bench, banging his fist on the scarred wood, tears streaming.
Hector waves the joint in the air.
– He’s gone over the edge, man.
George bites his lip.
– Definitely on the dark side now.
Andy is at the sink that their dad uses for washing paintbrushes and their mom uses for bleaching things. He splashes water on his face, rinsing away the mucus around his mouth and nose.
– Man, he’s losing it, he may never come back. No wonder you guys laugh at me when I’m like that, he’s a mess.
Still bent at the waist, Paul lurches across the garage, shouldering Andy to the side and sticking his head under the tap.
George goes and stands right behind him.
– That’s a good strategy, wash that shit out of your system. Nothing like a quick shower to help reestablish some fucking self control. You want me to wash your hair for you?
Paul comes up, flinging his head back and shaking it from side to side, water flying and spraying the others.
– Oh fuck, man! Whew! Oh my God. I lost it, man.
He shoves Andy.
– You busted my shit up.
Andy grabs a dirty bath towel from the basket sitting on top of the washing machine and dries his face.
– Yeah, nice to know when I’m choking to death it’s good for a fucking laugh.
Paul snags the towel from him and rubs his hair.
– Fucking A right about that.
Hector holds out the joint.
– So who’s ready for another hit?
They all fall out, staggering into the open air and sunlight of the driveway.
Across the street, Mr. Marinovic comes out of his house and stands on the porch shaking his head at them. He walks down the cement path to the driveway and swings his garage door open and walks around the side of his ’78 Bonneville. Pulling into the street, he stops for a moment and watches them standing around their driveway, laughing and screaming and pointing at each other.
He rolls down his window and leans his head out.
– You should be working. It’s summer. Why don’t you have summer jobs?
The laughter stops. They all stare at him. The laughter starts again.
Mr. Marinovic rolls up his window, adjusts his rearview mirror, and puts the car in drive.
The boys watch Marinovic’s car turn the corner as they snort a few last laughs out their noses, shaking their heads, exhausted.
George walks to the curb and looks up and down the empty street. Paul joins him. A Cessna buzzes by overhead on its way to the municipal airport. It’s quiet again.
Paul blows out his cheeks to make himself look fat.
– Why don’t you have a summer job? Blah. Blahblahblahblaaaaaah.
George nods.
– Fuck him. We have a summer job.
– Fucking A. Let’s get to work.
And they run across the street into the open garage and through the unlocked door that leads inside Mr. Marinovic’s house.
The house smells like bug spray and TV dinners. Plastic runners laid across the wall to wall carpet lead through the livingroom and down the hall.
They ignore the kitchen. Nobody hides shit in the kitchen. They ignore the color TV and the console stereo and anything else that’s just too big. They go to the master bedroom and Paul hits the medicine cabinet while George goes through the dresser drawers. If there’s cash or jewelry stashed, it’ll be in the dresser or the nightstand or the closet.
He runs his hands between neatly folded shirts. Squeezes rolled pairs of socks to see if anything offers resistance. He finds a box of condoms and a business card from the massage parlor across town, a phone number written on the back in green ballpoint. Which is all pretty gross. But at least the guy’s wife is dead. So it’s not as gross as it would be otherwise.
Paul comes out of the john rattling a brown prescription bottle. George looks at the label. Phenobarbital. He remembers something Aunt Amy told him.
– Shit’s for epilepsy.
Paul opens the bottle and looks at the pills.
– Does it get you sideways?
– Fuck yeah.
– Think Marinovic is epileptic?
– He’s got the pills.
Paul pours his palm full of pills and caps the bottle.
– I’ll only take half.
He puts the bottle back where he found it and goes to check out the spare room.
George is going through the pockets of the clothes hanging in the closet. He spots something on the top shelf, reaches up and pulls down a jewelry box and opens it. Mrs. Marinovic’s old jewelry.
Five bucks a week allowance for doing chores around the house doesn’t even cover smokes. And the few extra bucks to be made some weekends when his dad takes him to a job site where they need a couple kids to clean shit up? Four bucks an hour to shovel plaster fragments and splintered plywood and bent nails and haul the shit out to a dumpster. Sweeping up and packing tools away in the sun and a half hour for lunch and all the guys on the site calling him kid and giving him shit about his long hair and the silver and turquoise necklace and ring he wears.
Only way he’s ever really made money was running pills last summer for Aunt Amy while his mom and dad thought he was doing custodial at the water treatment plant by the airport.
She robbed the pills from the hospital dispensary on her RN shifts and dropped two bucks on him for each delivery. He spent last summer ducking in and out of her house on Rincon Avenue to see if she had anything for him to run. She told him not to tell the other guys, especially not Andy, but he couldn’t keep it to himself. Running dope, man, it was too cool not to tell them about it. Plus, they knew he wasn’t mopping any fucking floors and he wasn’t gonna lie to his brother and his best friends about how he got the cash for his Mongoose.
He kept doing it after school started, just a couple deliveries a week when he had time, cigarette money and shit. Hell, he’d still be doing it except they got in a fight about a delivery that came up short. A few ludes and a couple whites and she pitched a fit. Like it hadn’t happened before. But all of a sudden it was a big deal this time. Fuck it. By then he had the bike. He walked out of her place while she was yelling at him.
Acti
ng like she was a boss or something.
Only time he’d seen her since was when she came over for last Christmas. Gave Andy a Star Wars model, an X-Wing. Gave him a sweater with a reindeer on the front. Whatever. They’ll make it up sooner or later. She’s too cool not to be friends with.
Totally different from his dad. Which is why his dad can’t stand her.
Delivering the pills had been cool. Hanging on Aunt Amy’s couch and smoking her Marlboro 100’s and helping her sort the pills she stole from the dispensary into baggies and cranking twist ties around their tops and tucking the bags into his pockets after a few calls had come in. Hustling over to Shovelhead’s, pounding on the door to be heard over Steppenwolf playing “Pusherman.” Folding the cash into a tight bundle and slipping it into his sock. Taking a hit off Shovelhead’s huge neutronbong and bouncing two blocks to Tiny Red’s. Swapping a quarter gram of pharmaceutical coke for sheets of Mickey Wizard blotter acid, tiny pictures of Mickey Mouse in his Fantasia costume printed on each tab. Hanging with some of the younger guys, the cooler ones. Like Jeff. That’d been alright.
But it was still a job. It was still someone telling you where to go and what to do and how to do it.
This is different. Going in someone’s house when they’re not there? Better yet, when they are? That’s like the total opposite of doing what you’re told. That’s blazing a trail and doing it your own way. Whatever you find, cash, drugs, some silver or gold that you can take out to Hayward on the bus and hock, it’s all yours. You take the risks and you get the rewards. Get caught, well that’s just your own fault. It’s all on you. No bosses. No coming home like his mom and dad, burned out and sleepwalking through the evening and dropping into bed and struggling through the next morning to do it again. None of that shit.
He takes Mrs. Marinovic’s engagement ring and her wedding ring and a set of tiny diamond earrings and a pearl choker and puts the box back on the top shelf, and he and Paul head out.
In the street, Hector and Andy toss a football back and forth. Hector lobbing the easiest passes he can, Andy dropping them anyway, then chucking the ball way too low so that Hector has no chance to catch it and it ends up under a car half the time.
George whistles from inside the garage and Hector and Andy look up and down the street and give a thumbs up and George and Paul run out and they all trot back into their own garage.
Paul doles out the phenobarbital, two each and three for him, and they add the rings and earrings and pearls to the chains from the Arroyos and look at the pile.
Paul tosses a pheno in his mouth and dry swallows.
– Fuck the bus ride to Hayward. Let’s bike over to Jeff’s and see if he can help us move it here in town.
His Son Reeling
Paul leads them in a pack across the field to Portola. They cut across the QuickStop blacktop, go under the arching sign for the Rancho Vista Trailer Park, and down the gravel drive that runs between the trailers. They round a bend, pass a double with a mini white picket fence running around an Astroturf lawn patrolled by a toy poodle, and there’s Jeff on the porch of his own single.
Rust streaks down the yellow and white siding, weeds standing knee high all around, a corrugated tin awning shading the porch, cracked plastic tiki lamps dangling from its lip. Two beat to hell ’63 VW Beetles, one being cannibalized for parts, the other consuming them; a ’70 Datsun 240Z on blocks; and a sometimes functional ’69 Chevy pickup, stand in front leaking oil, antifreeze, and radiator water into the weeds.
In the shade of the awning, Jeff sits on an upside down milk crate, the stripped carburetor from his ’76 Harley XLH 1000 Sportster spread on a flattened cardboard box at his feet. The guys crunch up, and he waves oily fingers at them, pulling a filterless Camel from between his lips.
– Hey, fuckos.
Paul leans his bike on the 240Z and Jeff waves his cigarette.
– Hey, whoa, no, not on the wheels.
Paul moves the bike, leans it against the porch.
– Sorry, Jeff.
Jeff puts the smoke back in his face.
– ’S no problem. What up with you guys?
Paul stands at the foot of the steps leading to the porch, the guys are still straddling their bikes, looking at rocks, trees, weeds. He pulls out a Marlboro.
– Kinda wanted to talk.
– Yeah?
– Yeah.
Jeff goes back to work on the carburetor, dipping a rag into an old baby food jar full of gasoline and using it to clean a residue of black carbon from inside the carburetor.
– What about?
– Some shit.
Jeff cleans. The guys stand around.
Paul takes a step up.
– Jeff?
– I’m still here.
– Yeah. Could we maybe talk about it inside?
Jeff rubs his wrist against his chin, takes the smoke from his mouth and tosses it in the dry weeds.
– Look, guys, I got to be at work in a couple hours and I want to get this thing back together so I can ride. Sick of the damn bus. Something’s up, get to it.
Still straddling his bike, Andy waddles forward and steps on the smoldering butt before it can ignite the oil soaked weeds around the cars.
He looks at Jeff.
– We stole some stuff and we want to know if you can hock it for us.
Jeff gets up, wipes his hands on the ass of his jeans, opens the front door and points inside.
– Everybody out of the fucking water.
By sitting on the kitchen counter and leaning his face against the far end of the window over the sink, Mr. Cheney can see all the way down the street to the front of the Whelan house.
He’s watching when Hector rides up, that disturbing wedge of hair jutting up from his head. He’d been such a sweet quiet boy when his family moved into the neighborhood. The first Mexican family on the block. Well, the only one actually.
He reaches for the brandy and tips more into his coffee cup, no longer bothering to mark the label or put the bottle back in the cupboard after each drink. It’s nearly empty now, so why bother? A quick run to the Liquor Barn and he’ll have a full one. Or maybe not, a drive into Pleasanton seems rather far. The Safeway is closer. Except that Cindy Whelan will be working there. Well, a few groceries to surround the bottle then, just to keep her minding her own business.
Oh nonsense!
Dave’s Liquors is right next door to the Safeway, if he’s going to drive to the shopping center he can just go to Dave’s. To hell if anyone sees him going in there twice in one week. Three times? Hell with it anyway. And he can get a pint at Dave’s, something for the glove box as well as the bottle for the house.
He empties the last of the brandy and leans his forehead against the window as the boys tumble out of the garage, laughing.
They’re high. Christ, they’re stoned out of their minds. He saw enough of it. From Paul’s mom. Woman could barely get up in the morning without smoking a joint.
His son is reeling around the driveway, mouth open, too far away for his father to hear the sound of his laughter.
Mr. Cheney remembers when he could make his son laugh like that. The boy was so ticklish. Under his arms. Tickle him under his arms and he would kick and scream, tears running. Not any more. Now he has to get stoned to have a laugh.
Damn that woman.
If only she had left sooner. If she had taken her drugs and her rock and roll and her Disarm Now posters and gotten the hell out of here sooner. Maybe it’s not kind to say, but if only she had died sooner, maybe then his son wouldn’t be the mess he is today.
But that will be changing soon. Paul may ignore him, ignore his attempts to communicate and to return their relationship to what it once was, but he will have to listen when confronted with the contents of that bag.
He’s not a stupid man, after all. Top of his class. He knows amphetamine when he sees it. And he knows enough about his son’s history with the Arroyos to see that the bag is somehow conne
cted to their arrests. Paul will have to listen to him in the face of that knowledge.
Not that he wants to threaten the boy. Not that he’ll handle it that way. A conversation is all it will take. A conversation explaining that he doesn’t want to see his son getting into trouble that he can’t get out of.
And what’s he asking for anyway? Nothing. Just to be included. Just for them to spend time together. Just for his son to be available to him.
He brings the cup to his lips, but it’s empty again.
He looks at his watch. His first class begins in two hours. A quick trip to Dave’s and then out to the campus will take half an hour. That gives him another ninety minutes to watch his son. Mr. Marinovic stops his car in front of the boys and says something. He watches as the old man drives off and Paul and George run across the street and out of his view. And he’s still there, face pressed to the glass, five minutes later when they run back into the Whelans’ garage followed by Hector and Andy.
By the time they’re on their bikes and riding down the street hurling insults at one another, he’s called the school and told them he’s too sick to come in today and is crouched low in the driver’s seat of his car.
He drives around the block, going the opposite direction from the boys, and rounds the corner in time to see them taking their bikes across the field where the old elementary school used to be. He ignores the stop sign at the end of the block and turns onto Murrieta in front of a speeding station wagon with fake wood paneling on the side, forcing the other car to hit its brakes, the driver leaning on his horn.
As he takes a left on Portola, the boys have broken from the field and are skidding from the sidewalk into the QuickStop lot and on under the sign for the trailer park. He parks in the Orchard Hardware lot across the street and waits.
Baking in the sun that pounds through the windshield, looking at the liquor display in the QuickStop window.
The Little Brothers You Never Had
Jeff takes another sip of lukewarm beer, looking at the pile of jewelry on his counter, teasing one of the chains loose from the tangle.
The Shotgun Rule Page 7