The Broken Places

by Susan Perabo

  “Oh, man,” he wheezed, reaching Paul and bending over, hands on his knees. “Oh man oh man oh man. . . . I been running all over this damn city half the day. Finally had to go to the stadium across town to get the right one.” He unbent himself, shook out the jersey with a flourish, smiled broadly. “Official L.A. Lakers,” he said. “Same one they wear on the court. You can show it off to everybody back home, hey?”

  “Um, yeah,” Paul said. He stood, steadied the bag on his shoulder, took the jersey. “I mean, the Lakers stink. But thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.” Sonny gave him a brief hug, the guy hug, sloppy and slappy. He smelled funny, his shirt and neck and arms. Paul couldn’t identify the smell at first, but after a moment it came to him: on a rainy afternoon a few years before, he’d pried the slimy ball from a bottle of roll-on deodorant, curious to see how exactly it worked, then spilled the milky liquid all over the bathroom trying to jam the slippery ball back into place. His father smelled like a whole bottle of Right Guard.

  “Are you all right?” Paul asked, curling his nose and backing away.

  “Sure. Sure thing.” Sonny coughed from deep in his chest, wiped a line of sweat from his upper lip. “I just ran about seventy gates, kiddo. Gotta be a mile at least. Been waiting long?”

  “Only a few minutes,” Paul said. “No big deal.”

  They began the long walk through the terminal. His father kept slapping him on the back or squeezing his shoulder, asking him questions about the flight, the food, his fellow travelers. Passing by an airport gift shop at the mouth of the terminal, Paul spotted a rack of L.A. Lakers jerseys he was pretty certain were identical to the one he held in his hand. If he’d been eight, even ten, the realization of “the airport gift” might have thrown him. But he was grown up, old enough to think his father’s little lie was actually kind of sweet.

  They stopped for dinner on the way back to the hotel. Over hamburgers, Sonny told Paul about the movie. It was amazing, he said, the way things worked out here. They were building the entire exterior of the Neidermeyer house just so they could knock it down. The movie was cool — no Shakespeare or anything, Sonny was quick to point out — but better than most anything else you’d see on TV these days. Paul was so excited he could hardly eat. He felt like he was on an adventure with his father, felt finally like it was just the two of them. He knew, of course, that Ian was at the hotel, but in the weeks that had passed since he’d last seen Ian, Paul had been able to once again assign him the penciled face of the convenience store thief, a face so void of character that it could pose no real threat to what he and his father had.

  Square-footage-wise, the Tucker suite at the Beverly Hills Twin Crowns Hotel was twice the size of the Tucker home in Casey, Pennsylvania. They each had their own bedroom and the living room was massive: a wet bar, three couches, a glass coffee table big enough to sleep on, a big-screen television, a desk with a phone, computer, fax machine, and portable copier. On the other side of two sliding glass doors, a wide balcony with a glass-top table and four wrought iron chairs looked down onto the shops and restaurants below.

  Upon arriving in the suite Sonny had immediately departed for the shower. Paul sat on a padded stool at the wet bar in the corner of the living room, munching on some nuts from a gigantic fruit basket that had already been picked over thoroughly. He was digging the last cashew from the bottom of the basket when he heard coughing from Ian’s bedroom. The door was open a bit and he peered in. The bed was unmade and vacant. Beside it, on the floor, lay Ian’s leg. The upper part — the shin — was rubbery and flesh colored; the middle — the ankle — was simply a rod of steel about the width of a tire iron; the foot wore a black shoe and a thick sock. Paul crept toward it, intrigued. Did the shin feel like skin? Was the steel rod solid or hollow? What did the foot look like, under the shoe? Did it have toes?

  Another cough. Paul turned toward the sound and saw Ian in the bathroom. He was lounging in a giant sunken Jacuzzi, his eyes closed, a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Paul approached the door, his eyes widening. The bathroom was nearly as big as his room at home.

  Ian opened his eyes, took a languid drag from his cigarette. “Look what the cat drug all the way from Pennsylvania,” he said.

  Paul didn’t respond. He was looking at Ian’s bare back. This was the first time he’d seen the infamous tattoo; as wide as his palm, the swastika seemed to glow in the fluorescent lights of the bathroom. The lines intersected at Ian’s shoulder blade, so as Ian reached to stub out his cigarette the swastika shuddered and rolled.

  “Something, isn’t it?”

  Paul turned. His father was standing in the doorway in a white bathrobe. He had trimmed his “goatee” so it didn’t look quite so much like roadkill. He smiled as he nodded toward the tub. “Beats a hot bath at home, I’ll tell you that.”

  “How come he got the room with the Jacuzzi?” Paul asked.

  Sonny shrugged. “I dunno. I —”

  “I’m the one bringin’ in all the babes,” Ian said. “What’s your old man need with a Jacuzzi anyways?”

  Sonny sat down on the edge of the tub, dangled his feet in the water. “Give it a go,” he said.

  Paul kicked off his shoes. For a moment he considered taking off his pants, but he wasn’t sure he wanted Ian to see him in his underwear, so he simply rolled the cuffs up to his knees and stepped into the tub, sat down beside his father.

  “Tell me more about the movie,” he said. His toes tingled from the hot water, and he clenched them against the tile. “Are the actors cool?”

  “Guy who plays me is a fag,” Ian said.

  Sonny kicked a splash in his direction. “I told you to cut that out.”

  “Why? ’Cause half the guys in town are fags? What’re they gonna do? Slap me?”

  “What about the guy who plays me?” Paul asked. He was looking directly at his father when he asked, but it was Ian who answered.

  “Oh, he’s a big star. Name’s Luke Milo. You see Titanic?”

  “Sure,” Paul said. “He’s in that?”

  “You better believe it. Know that part when the boat tips over and there’re like a thousand people sliding into the ocean? He’s one of the sliders. I think if you play the movie real slow — go frame by frame, you know? — you can see the back of his head when he falls in the water.”

  “The Academy overlooked his performance,” Sonny said with a straight face.

  “A crime,” Ian added.

  “Is anybody good?” Paul asked.

  “The whole thing sucks, jocko,” Ian said, plucking a cigarette from his pack. “I’m telling you, it’s the biggest piece of shit you’ve ever seen.”

  “He likes it,” Paul said, gesturing toward his father. “He said it was cool.”

  “Lousy taste,” Ian said. “You ever hear the music he listens to?”

  • • •

  Maybe the kid who played Ian was a fag, but Paul wasn’t sure. You couldn’t tell just by looking, not always. A kid in his class, Joel Lebo, had a big brother who had turned out to be a fag, but Dave Lebo still held the Casey High record for the most total yards in one season. So who knew anymore what was what? And since Roger Rhodes, the young actor, was dressed as Ian — jeans, heavy boots, long-sleeved black shirt — he looked mostly like a regular guy. He was standing with the director, Lilly Douglass, a broomstick-thin black woman with huge round glasses.

  “Hey, boss,” Ian said, sliding up next to her and tossing his hair from his face.

  Roger Rhodes looked Ian up and down. “You’re back,” he said dolefully, as if Ian were a recurring bout of bronchitis.

  The set was smaller than Paul had imagined it would be, no bigger than the narrow gymnasium at Casey Junior High. Wires crisscrossed the floor, taped down with gray duct tape. Three huge cameras were pointed toward a blue couch on which sat a boy of about Paul’s age — it must have been Luke Milo, of Titanic fame — flipping through a magazine. Beside the cameras were half a dozen
tan directors’ chairs. On the back of one was the name “Douglass” — Lilly’s chair. On another was the name “Markham,” the actor who played Sonny.

  “What’s the schedule today?” Sonny asked Lilly eagerly, popping up behind her shoulder and peering at the piece of paper in her hand. Paul felt vaguely embarrassed by his father. He wondered what these people thought of him. Were they really listening to anything he had to say? Or did they make fun of him when he was out of earshot, roll their eyes and make snide comments about the small-town fireman? Could you take the man out of Casey but not Casey out of the man?

  “Nothing, right now,” Lilly said, glancing at her watch. “We’re waiting on rewrites. We’ve got to ax four minutes off the script.”

  “You’re gonna end up on the cutting room floor,” Ian said to Paul. He nodded toward the set. “You and the slider over there.”

  Lilly smiled at Paul. “Contrary to his belief,” she said, “Ian is actually not in charge of the movie.”

  Eventually they cleared the set for a scene between Dale Markham and Olivia Chase, the actress who was playing Laura. It was supposed to be the morning of the house collapse, and Sonny was saying goodbye to his wife. Paul sat in Dale Markham’s chair and Sonny and Ian sat in unmarked chairs that they had apparently claimed as their own.

  “Hey, Dad,” Paul said. “You weren’t home that morning.”

  “Shhh,” Sonny said, putting a finger to his lips.

  “Welcome to Hollywood,” Ian said cheerfully. “If they say he was home, then he was home. That’s the way it works, jocko: they got their story and they’re stickin’ to it.”

  “But it’s wrong,” Paul said, and Ian cackled.

  “ACTION,” Lilly Douglass shouted.

  Olivia Chase didn’t talk anything like his mother; her voice was high, just on the edge of chipper, a far cry from his mother’s measured tones. And Dale Markham had at least three inches on Sonny. They stood in the middle of the “living room” and touched each other on the cheeks as they spoke, which Paul recognized as an outright fraud; sometimes his parents touched each other’s hands as they talked, lightly and intimately, but never on the face like some moronic soap opera.

  Laura

  I don’t know what it is. I’ve just got a bad feeling about today. I can’t shake the feeling that —

  Sonny

  (smiling gently) You worry too much, sweetie. Today’s gonna be no different from any other day in the last thirteen years.

  “That’s what they call ‘dramatic foreshadowing,’ ” Ian whispered to Paul. “Subtle, huh?”

  Sonny shot them a stern look from his chair; he was watching the scene intently, seemed to be hanging on every word. Paul marveled at the distortion that was unfolding in front of him; sure, the lines stunk, but what really amazed him was how wrong they’d gotten his mother. A bad feeling she couldn’t shake? What had happened to “kiss the kitty for me”?

  “They don’t know anything,” he whispered to Ian.

  Ian winked. “Now you’re catching on.”

  “What’re we doing tonight?” Paul asked Sonny when they arrived back at the hotel. “Can we go out somewhere?”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Sonny said. He went to the bar and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. “Where you wanna go?”

  “Can we go to the Hard Rock Cafe? I wanna get a T-shirt.”

  “You sucker,” Ian said. He plopped down on the recliner and cranked it back, stretched his arms above his head and yawned. “Those Hard Rock guys’ve made a billion dollars off dimmos like you. And anyway,” he added, “I don’t wanna go out. I been out all day.”

  “Then you stay here,” Paul said happily. “And we’ll go. Right, Dad?”

  Sonny was silent, stared into the mouth of the beer bottle as if a Magic 8 Ball triangle might reveal the answer at any moment. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’m kinda pooped too. But hey, did I tell you? They got great room service here. We could order up some food, whatever you want. They got an ice-cream sundae with seven scoops. How’s that for a killer dinner?”

  “So we’re just gonna sit around here all night?” Paul asked. There was a little whine to his voice, a whine he hadn’t intended and didn’t approve of, a whine he hoped no one had noticed.

  “Wah, wah, wah, baby wanna go out,” Ian said, flipping the wing of black hair from his eyes. “Baby sad and he no like it here.”

  Paul sat down on the couch. It was a hideous thing, slick green leather and so overly inflated it sighed with every movement. Paul felt like he was perched on a raft. “I like it here fine,” he said.

  “You sure?” Sonny asked. “I mean I —”

  “Sure,” Paul said casually. He couldn’t very well complain now, once he’d already sunk himself with his stupid whining. “Whatever you want. I’m cool.”

  “We just split around,” Sonny explained to Paul after placing the order, plopping down on the couch beside him. “We’re trying to sample everything.”

  “We’re halfway through seafood,” Ian said. “You missed squid.”

  “But we can do squid again,” Sonny said, nodding enthusiastically at Paul. “If you want. We can do squid tomorrow.”

  He picked up the televeision remote — it had enough buttons, Paul thought, to control an aircraft carrier — and displayed it from several different angles, as if he were a model at a car show.

  “Guess how many channels,” he said.

  Paul shrugged.

  “C’mon, guess. Be a sport.”

  “A hundred?”

  Sonny scoffed. “Three hundred. Three-zero-zero. Ian and me did the math — you could watch TV nonstop for nineteen months and never see the same show twice.”

  “Cool,” Paul said. So this, he thought, was how his father and Ian had been entertaining themselves every evening, holed up like a couple of fugitives in their royal suite, with their precious TV and their precious hot tub and their precious room service.

  “The kid’s with me,” Ian said, jerking his thumb toward Paul. “He thinks the movie sucks.”

  “I didn’t say it sucked,” Paul said, wanting — more than just about anything, really — to not side with Ian, on matters large or small. “It’s just . . . weird. Like, they’re making most of it up.”

  Sonny rubbed the uneven stubble on his chin. Paul still couldn’t get used to the hair on his father’s face. Was he trying to look cool? Was he trying to look like Ian? Could he not see, in the mirror, that he looked like a homeless person?

  “That’s what they do out here,” Sonny said. “With everything. Real life doesn’t fit into a movie.”

  “When do they shoot the part of you guys in the basement?”

  “Soon,” Sonny said. He reached absently for Ian’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. For a moment it looked to Paul like he was going to take one, but then he just turned the pack over a couple of times in his hand and set it down again. “End of the week, I think.”

  “You should hear some of the crap they got us sayin’,” Ian said. “It’s like a fucking Hallmark card.”

  “They gotta write something,” Sonny said. “People don’t want to see two guys just lying around, right? I slept through half of it. Who’s gonna want to watch me sleep?”

  Ian smirked at Paul. “Yeah, this guy’s snoozin’,” he said. “I mean sawing logs, drool, the whole deal. Meanwhile my foot’s so flat under that fridge they coulda served it at IHOP. So much for search and rescue. More like search and nap.”

  Asshole, Paul thought. Why did his father put up with it, Ian ragging on him, mocking him? It was as if Ian had taken over the role once reserved exclusively for his mother. Didn’t anybody take his father seriously?

  “Were you scared?” Paul asked. He remembered what his father had told him that night at Bonanza, had taken pleasure on several occasions imagining Ian with muddy tears streaming down his cheeks, his hands trembling, his teeth chattering. If his father wasn’t going to stand up for himself, then Paul would
do the payback for him.

  “Me?” Ian asked. “Me, scared?”

  Paul shrugged. “Just wondering.” He nodded to his father. “ ’Cause he said you were kinda scared.”

  Ian scoffed, raised his eyebrows at Sonny. “Oh he did, did he?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Sonny snapped, glaring at Paul. “I didn’t say anything like that. All I said was —”

  “I’ll tell you what he said,” Ian hissed, his eyes locked with Sonny’s. “He said he was sure glad his pussy son wasn’t trapped in that basement, ’cause he’d be bawling like a baby, calling for his mommy, wettin’ his —”

  “I didn’t say that either,” Sonny said. He stood up, looked around for something to do, then sat down again. “Joke’s over, okay?” He forced a smile, squeezed Paul’s shoulder. “Seven scoops,” he said. “Every one a different flavor.”

  “That’s great, Dad,” Paul said, shrugging his shoulder free. “Great.”

  • • •

  The following day they shot the final scenes on the set of the Tucker house, and Paul got his first opportunity to watch the boy, Luke Milo, who played him. Watching strangers play his parents had been laughable, but watching someone play him was downright creepy. The things Luke Milo said to Dale Markham were things he never would have said to his father in real life, but they were things he’d thought in real life, bits of sentimental garbage that he’d never have let slip, no matter how scared he was.

  That night they went to the hotel pub for dinner. After they finished eating, Sonny gave Paul twenty dollars and told him he could do whatever he wanted. Since everything but the video games — bumper pool, air hockey, tabletop shuffleboard — required more than one person, and both his father and Ian appeared to be rooted to the booth, Paul ended up playing Vigilante, a video game that honed the player’s skills for the not unlikely possibility of winding up in postapocalyptic Los Angeles with an arsenal of postapocalyptic weapons to put to use against post-apocalyptic gangs that were threatening to take over the city. After an hour or so of decapitating and disemboweling animated thugs (some of whom, Paul noted happily, bore a striking resemblance to Ian) he returned to the booth. Sonny and Ian were in the middle of a conversation that ended abruptly when Paul slid in beside his father.