Bloodbrothers

by Richard Price

  Butler tried to say something, but Stony held him back.

  "What's your friend's name?" Stony asked in a calm but intense tone that made the driver at least look at if not answer him.

  "The girl name is Gelia..."

  Both Stony and Butler spun half-around at the sound of the deep Jamaican voice. Slowly the rear-seat window rolled down with an electric hum. The impassive black face was almost invisible behind steel-rim shades and a salt and pepper goatee.

  "...an' she go for thirty bills."

  ***

  "You work outta this place mainly?" Stony tried to sound cool as he took off his shirt. Gelia didn't answer. They were in a clean but boring motel off the highway on the Bronx side of the Mount Vernon border.

  Gelia pulled off her green turtleneck. A plump pale tit fell out of her peach-colored bra. She hadn't looked at Stony once since the deal. Stony eyed the curve of her belly. She didn't bother to put her tit back. Stony sucked in his gut and casually tensed his biceps. She could have cared less. She slipped off her tartan plaid skirt but left on her brown leather knee-high boots. Stony sat down on a wooden rocking chair to pull off his shoes. He stared intensely at the opaque outline of her pubic hair through the lacy mesh of her white panties. When she turned around to pull down the bedspread, he imagined fucking her in the ass. The skin of her back was milky, and he followed the line of her spine up to the nape of her neck. Her yellow hair fell on either side of her neck. He could see the darker roots fan out from her part. With her back still to him she bent down and slipped off her panties. Stony stared at the scalloped curve of her ass for a minute. He was afraid he was going to come too fast so he got up and locked himself in the john. He tore off the blue and white sanitary seal on the toilet seat, took out his throbbing hard-on, straddled the bowl and started jerking off. When he came, his first feeling was of crushing loneliness and wishing that Butler was out there instead of the bitch. He imagined getting shit-faced with Butler, then cruising in Butler's car and scoring some pussy. Then he realized that's exactly what they did. He opened the bathroom door a crack and watched her standing naked except for the boots. Her bush was brown, soft and flattened against her slightly arching belly. Her nipples were smooth and untaut. Her eyes were narrow snaky green, devoid of emotion. Her nose was long, thin and freckled. He started getting another hard-on. Absently he pulled on his dick before returning to the bedroom.

  "A blow job's ten extra but I don't feel like it tonight anyhow. I don't do ass fucking. I gotta fuck on my side cause I got a bad back and if you shit in bed or do anything funny I'll cripple you for life."

  This was the first time she'd said anything to Stony. He sat on the bed and tried to say something amusing. "You tongue-kiss?"

  Ignoring him she walked around to the opposite side of the bed and lay down on her side facing the wall. She left the boots on. Stony stared at her spine, noticing little bumps all the way up.

  He lay on his side in the same position, his nose touching the back of her neck, his prick flat against her buttocks. He could sense that her eyes were open. The overhead light was still on. She lifted her left leg so that he could slip it in. Stony lowered himself a little so his lips were kissing her shoulder blades and taking his prick in his hand he tried to get inside. He couldn't do it. Death Valley. When he pushed harder she winced in annoyance. He froze, afraid she was going to do something like she threatened. He stared at the overhead light for a second, absently kissed her back.

  He wanted to lightly run his palm along the hills and curves of her side, but he was afraid. Her leg was still up in the air. Thinking that she might be getting impatient he tried once more to get in. No dice. He spit in his hand and rubbed the saliva over the mushroom tip of his dick. That made it easier. A little. A little, a little more, soon he was all the way in but still was afraid of stroking her belly or touching her tits. He held his breath as he fucked. He liked rubbing his crotch against her buttocks every time he went in deep. Raising himself slightly on his elbow he could see her profile. She was absently chewing on her thumbnail and spacily staring at the red on red fake brocade wallpaper.

  "How you doin'?" Stony ventured as he kept it moving around. Leaning slightly forward, not enough for him to fall out, she clicked on the plastic ivory-colored radio on the night table. Frankie Crocker's low-key riff filled the room. He stopped moving inside her, his guts felt like spilling water.

  "You come?" she asked. Stony started moving again, though he was losing his hard-on.

  "Almost." He stared at her back, her shoulder, the wallpaper. Frankie Crocker chuckled. He started feeling angry, and he fucked harder and faster, but she didn't move.

  Tell me somethin' go-o-od

  Tell me that you love me...

  She laid her arm against her side and patted her thigh in rhythm with the song.

  ***

  When Stony came downstairs to the lobby he found Butler sprawled out on a narrow sky blue couch with metal rods for legs. One arm lay across his eyes, a foot rested on the linoleum floor. Above him on the wood-paneled walls hung a Woolworth's painting of a kid fishing near a barn. When Stony got closer to the painting he realized the wood paneling was contact paper. Stony lightly kicked Butler's foot. Butler raised his head, eyes dazed, arm still shielding his face. "Hey! How'd it go?"

  "Fantastic," Stony monotoned. "Let's go."

  "You wanna go home?" Butler leaned over the rear of the front seat as he backed out the driveway.

  "Let's have a drink. How'd it go for you?"

  "Ah, for shit. That black bastard said thirty bucks, right? Well, I get undressed. I'm layin' on the bed nude, right? She takes her clothes off, sits between my legs and whips out a bag. Awright, I prefer bareback, but it's for my protection too, you know? Anyways, so there I am with this ski glove on my cock and she starts jerkin' me off. I'm gettin' nice and hard and I figure she'll jump on when it gets to her likin', but all of a sudden I'm feelin' like if she keeps it up I'm gonna come so I says, 'You better hop on now before you miss the show,' and she says. 'For thirty bucks all you get is a hand job, if you wanna get Laid it's an extra twenty.' " Butler punched Stony on the arm. "Motherfucker! So I said, 'I don't have an extra twenty,' and she says, 'How about your friend? Can you get it from him?' I said, 'Ahh, just finish what you're doin',' an' I came." Butler shrugged. "It was all right."

  "Dunsky," Stony laughed.

  Butler pulled into a roadside bar with a bright orange "Topless Dancers" sign in the window.

  "Butler, please." Stony gestured at the sign. "I just ate."

  Butler backed out to the highway. "That didn't happen to you, hah?"

  "Are you kiddin'? She was makin' so much noise we had to turn on the radio so the cops wouldn't come in."

  Butler shifted into forward.

  "I swear I was gonna ask her for thirty bills."

  "You know, Stony, if I didn't think you was lyin' through your teeth I'd be jealous."

  "I ain't lyin'." Stony shoved his fingers under Butler's nose. Butler sniffed without removing his gaze from the road.

  "Smells like hamburger to me." He pulled into Roland's, a nice, quiet, empty bar. "C'mon, I'll treat you to a Dunsky's Delight."

  An hour later, Butler almost carried Stony back to the car. "Butler, this tequila is makin' me sick. I can't explain to you about Cheri. I would come in her mouth, and she would make one little motion, wiping her lips with her pinky, and I would get a hard-on all over again right then and there, and later I would fall asleep and wake up thinkin' all my crotch hair was burned, and I would feel the crispy burnt stubble and fall back on the pillow sweatin' like I was gonna die, and you don't understand. I want to feel this ... this shit I'm goin' through now. Like all my skin is peeled and any way I turn it hurts. Don't you understand, you stupid prick, you motherfuckin' bastard with your goddamn thirty-dollar hand job. Chen, you cunt of a lifetime, I love her, I can't breathe. Butler, you bastard; you stupid ... let's go home. I saw her put her goddamn lips on that pig's mout
h. Butler, do you love your prick? You should. I love my prick. It's like nobody else's. I don't understand how she could touch anybody else's when she got mine. Butler, open the goddamn windows, go faster. I need air. My dick is like my left hand. It got grace. Butler, open the goddamn window more. My hand can dance. Butler, you pinhead, I'm never alone. My hand is a goddamn ballerina. I'm never alone. When I was a kid I would lay in bed and my hand would dance for me in the dark. Butler, what's she doin' now? I want Chubby. Butler, be Chubby. Do you know how scared Albert is all the time? Do you know Mott, that motherless bastard, must got a prick like a dead twig? All fat guys except Chubby got small dicks. That's the law. Can you imagine what it must stink like when he takes a dump? She's a fuckin' hoowah, Butler. I wake up and my crotch is burnin'. I can smell the burnt hair an' she's sleepin' like nothin' happened. Butler, where we goin'? I don't wanna go home. There's nothin' there." Stony slid down in his seat, his cheek resting on the window.

  "Stony, I just got one question." Butler removed a fleck of tobacco from his tongue. "If I came runnin' into your room at the motel there tonight an' told you I needed another twenny to get laid, would you've given it to me? Hah?"

  Stony slept.

  4

  "YOU WANT SOME COFFEE, Tommy?" Phyllis stood before her husband and brother-in-law, almost kowtowing in her pale green housedress.

  "No thanks, dear." Tommy dangled one leg over the arm of the Barcalounger.

  "Chubby?"

  "No thank you, sweetheart." Chubby sat on the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, biting his nails.

  Phyllis smiled nervously. "I'm going to bed now."

  "I'll be in later, sweets." He turned to Tommy. "Hey, Stony tell you what happened last night?"

  "Yeah, I heard, yah beast!" Tommy smiled.

  Chubby got up. "You want some coffee, Tom?"

  "Just a little."

  Chubby fussed around in the kitchen and came out with two cups and a pastry box of cannoli. They sat in the dinette and dug in.

  "You hear anything about the union?" Chubby picked out a cannoli.

  "What about the union?" Tommy turned the box toward him and picked out the biggest one.

  "You know, about Stony."

  "Any time he wants, he's in." Tommy wiped his mouth with a napkin. "The fuckin' kid's breakin' my chops though. He keeps stallin', yes, no, yes, no."

  "Give 'im slack, he's goin' through a rough time."

  "Rough time, my ass. That kid's got it made. He ain't workin'. he ain't goin' a school. He hangs aroun' gettin' laid an'jerkin' his bird. He's gotta start pullin' his own weight or I'm gonna kick him out on the street."

  Chubby snorted. "Right, I can see you doin' that. Who you think you talkin' to, Indians?" Chubby picked up another cannoli. "You don't let that kid go to the john with less'en twenny bucks in his pocket."

  "Well, that's all gonna stop right away."

  "Uh-huh, hey, I gave Stones some pointers last night on how to handle women. The kid's awright, but sometimes I think he walks around wit' his head up his ass. Din't you ever tell 'im the facts a life?" Chubby licked some cream off his fingers.

  "Hell, no! Let 'im learn it the way I did ... in the gutter." Tommy laughed. "Nah, really, what am I supposed to tell 'im? How to stick it in?"

  "Nah, you know ... just ... he don't know how to handle things. I don't think he got any problem knowin' how to stick it in, he just don't know when to stick it in. An' I also think he don't know when to pull it out. That Cheri girl got him doin' a hurtin' dance."

  "Hey, you know what Pop said to me when I was twelve? Here's the facts a life for you. I ask him how you do it, you know? He says to me, 'Don't worry, when the time comes, you'll know, animals can do it, you can do it.'" Tommy slurped his coffee.

  "You're lucky. When I ast him, he answered wit' the back of his hand."

  "He was a motherfucker, wasn't he?"

  "Yeah, Pop was somethin' else again."

  "He really smacked you, hah?"

  "You should remember. Tom, that's when I was gonna leave home."

  "Oh yeah! That's when I came at you wit'..."

  "Yeah, remember? You was ten. I was packin' my knapsack an' I told you I was runnin' away. You left the room an' come back wit' a friggin' butcher knife. You says to me, 'If you ever do anything to break Mom's heart, I'll kill you.' "

  "Holy shit! I remember that! Yeah! I was a cunt hair away from runnin' you through."

  "I saw it in your face. You were one fuckin' sick puppy that day."

  "You know, it's funny. I didn't get scared standin' there with that knife, until I saw you was scared. You started unpackin' right away, remember?"

  "Do I remember! I didn't leave the fuckin' bedroom for a week, you sick fuck!"

  "Pop was a fuckin' bastard with us though. Hey, you remember that whistle a his? Any time I was playin' in the street an' I heard that whistle, my heart would jump into my mouth. No matter what I was doin' I would stop everything and run upstairs, an' half the time he was callin' me to whip my ass for somethin' or other. Din't make no difference cause I knew if he had to whistle again I would just get beat worse. Till the day I die I won't ever forget that whistle." Tommy put his thumb and middle finger on his tongue and let loose with three shrill blasts—the first two short, followed by a long, higher-pitched third.

  Chubby winced at the memory. "You know, Tom, about six years ago I heard a guy on a job give Pop's whistle. I almost shit on myself."

  "We were like trained dogs. One time I was fingerin' Sally Rudnick in the hallway. Pop whistles, I almost ripped out her box."

  "Yeah, but he had his moments though. I mean, he wasn't the greatest, but he did what he had to. We never starved, he always had a roof over our heads an' we always had a little coin in our pockets. He useta say alia time a man's only worth what he got in his wallet. An' he shoulda known too. I remember one year in the thirties he was holdin' down three jobs. He would come home at five from the construction site, eat dinner an' go down to the Times plant on Forty-sixth Street and load papers on the trucks until midnight an' on the weekends he was the bouncer at Gianelli's. You remember Gianelli's?"

  "Pop was a bouncer?"

  "Yeah. You was really little at that time. He did it for about six months until one Saturday night when he eighty-sixed some punk. The guy came back with some friends after closing an' they bushwhacked him outside the club, broke his fuckin' arm. Old man Gianelli fired him on the spot. What good's a bouncer with a busted arm? An' they din't have compensation in those days either."

  "I never knew that."

  "It's the truth. An' it took six months for that arm to heal because he wouldn't take time out to rest. He was probably the only guy doin' construction an' loadin' trucks in New York City with his arm in a sling."

  "Hard-nose bastard."

  "Give 'im his due, Tom."

  5

  MONDAY MORNING Marie and Phyllis did their weekly shopping together. After unpacking the groceries, Phyllis walked to Marie's to shoot the shit.

  Marie foraged in the refrigerator for the Half & Half. "I went to Schindler Friday."

  "For Albert?" Phyllis sat at the kitchen table, two cups of steaming black coffee and a box of marble cake in front of her.

  "For me." Marie shut the refrigerator door and sat down, putting a quart of milk on the table.

  "For what?" Phyllis lightened her coffee with the milk.

  Marie shrugged. "I still got those cramps."

  "I thought they went away." Phyllis picked at the cake.

  "They did. They came back. And I started bleedin' a little too." Marie extracted a cigarette from her red plastic case. "Schindler said it's from aggravation."

  "Aggravation?" Phyllis repeated incredulously. "He's a goddamn horse doctor. How come you don't use Schwartz?"

  Marie shrugged.

  "What Schwartz forgot is more than Schindler'll ever know."

  "I dunno. He gave me some tranquilizers."

  "He's a quack," Phyllis said co
ntemptuously.

  "At least he's better'n Marcus. Remember Marcus?"

  "Marcus, even if Marcus was a horse doctor, he'd still be a quack."

  "Remember when I was in Parkchester with Albert?"

  "Oh, with the tubes?"

  "The tubes?"

  "Yeah. The thing with the tubes, you remember."

  "Oh that. I almost forgot that. God, that was something, but I wasn't thinkin' about the thing with the tubes, I was thinkin' about the thing with the blood," Marie said.

  "What thing with the blood?"

  "You know, with the needle?"

  "I don't remember."

  "Maybe I never told you ... when Marcus took blood?"

  "No."

  "Remember, I was in Parkchester two days before I had Albert? The night before I had him Marcus had to take blood from me. One of the big needles that they take from here." She tapped the inside of her elbow. Phyllis made a face. "You know I'm not squeamish or anything. When Stony opened his head on the wall that time I was the only one that could stand there with the ice cubes," Marie said.

  "I remember Tommy fainted." Phyllis raised her eyebrows.

  "Yeah, big tough guy. Anyways, so you know, I'm not afraid of a little blood. But what Marcus did ... I was sittin' in a wheelchair. They had me in a white smock, and you know how Marcus always had the shakes?"

  "Yeah, well, he was shootin' up all the time," Phyllis said offhandedly. "That was the only thing that kept him going. I saw him do it once in the bathroom. He came over one time when Chubby had the flu. He walks in the house and goes straight to the bathroom and shoots up. It was probably speed," Phyllis added knowledgeably, "that's the only way that old bastard could keep goin'. He wouldn't take on a younger doctor to help him. I saw him shoot up and I said forget it, that's it. I don't need a junkie doctor for me an' my own. You remember I called you that day? You didn't believe me."

  "If I called you then, would you believe me?" Marie shrugged. "Whatever ... anyways ... I'm sittin' on a chair in my room. It's night; Tommy just left, and I was reading a Life magazine." She flicked the ash of her cigarette. "This nurse comes in with a wheelchair and wheels me down to this lab or something and there's Marcus waiting for me with this big needle to take blood and I see he's into his "Shimmy Like Kate" number. The nurse gets me up on this table, ties one of those rubber things around my arm and Marcus goes in with the needle. I was scared because he was shakin' like he just got religion. But it don't hurt much, it's over real quick and he starts injecting the blood into this test tube. The nurse starts takin' the rubber tube off my arm and she must've bumped a tray or something off the table but all of a sudden there's this crash. Marcus ... Marcus jumps twenty feet in the air and spills all the blood in the test tube all over me, all over my white smock, and I look down and I'm drenched with my own blood."