Beautiful Children

by Charles Bock

  Her tongue pressed into his, circling, moving faster, her kisses turning urgent, powerful, they took control of her breathing, left her short of air. Her body was just alert enough to break the embrace, and Ponyboy bit lightly down onto her lower lip, and more of the world started filling in around her now, each sensation like a section from a color-by-numbers drawing: first the separate and contrary noise of two bottles rolling across the floor in different directions; then the crimson flicker of a lava lamp with draining batteries; and then the lights of a passing semi, a neon motel vacancy sign, both coming in through an open space.

  The ice cream truck kept barreling down the open road, and in the mouth of the truck's opened door, she saw the shadowed bodies of different punks pushing at one another, jostling and cursing, most of it good-naturedly, everyone packed pretty tightly back there. In the darkness, a lot of the punkers had the appearance of parachuters bunched into the back of a World War II bomber, and the stench of their unwashed, baking bodies was worse than the smell of rotting garbage when the girl forgot to take out the trash. She remained unconcerned, kept staring at Ponyboy, at how the incoming breeze was playing lightly with his wilting spikes of hair, at the quarter moon of sweat knifing the side of his face. Although she could not read his expression, he was staring back at her, the whites of his eyes shimmering, his irises glowing with dazzling delicacy. And staring at him, watching him stare right back, the girl knew Ponyboy was examining something inside her. Studying the girl in a way that made her know that, for the first time in her life, someone understood the crucial details of her being.

  But something else was happening, too, the larger atmosphere becoming charged, voices were rising, centered around what sounded like whelping, a happy animal, shouts and jibes and gleeful barks. Ponyboy's pupils flickered in response, drifting off center. And even as a pit opened inside the girl, she also did a half turn on the old tire, attempting to see between the blurring bodies, to the source of the commotion.

  It was some sort of bizarre dance: this brownish animal in the door well. First the girl thought it might be a horse, but it was too small for that, so maybe like a dog. It was trying to get a sniff of wind, but someone was flicking its ears, play-slapping at its nose. The girl couldn't entirely make out who kept bothering the dog. Like some kind of walrus, only with this massive, bulbous stomach. The bulbous walrus was swaying and unsteady, but kept teasing the animal, feinting at it like a shadow boxer, and the animal was following along, tracking the hands, measuring their movements, making small lunges and then unleashing these rich, happy whelps.

  In the recesses of the overstuffed closet that was the girl's mind, it seemed she had intimate knowledge of the walrus. If she had been lucid, the girl was sure she'd recognize its laughing sounds. Only now something else was intruding. Thin like a blade. But covered in black. A vampire.

  “JESUS, DAPHNEY,” the vampire screamed, as he jumped between the dog and the walrus. Jerking on the mongrel's rope leash, he pulled the dog away from the ledge, back into the van. “Nice fucking mom there.”

  The wheels of the girl's mind, rusty though they may have been, ground forward.

  “Can't even take care of a fucking mutt,” Lestat continued.

  The girl tried to get up, only to have her lack of dexterity reaffirmed. She tried again, barely getting to her feet and then plopping back down. Slurring, she yelled. “FUCKER. DON’T YOU TOUCH HER.”

  Then became aware of the hand lingering on the edge of the broken hem of her thrift-store skirt; aware of Ponyboy's touch—calm, practiced, firm. The girl discovered she liked being touched by someone who knew what he was doing.

  “Don't worry about them,” Ponyboy said. “Those two pull this shit all the time. Like some old married couple.”

  “That vampire's lucky. If I had some protein in me, he wouldn't be picking on no dogs.”

  Daphney's laughing protests were loud, as were Lestat's insults. The girl stumbled over a syllable, paused. “I'm not scared of nothing. Can magic like you don't know. All kinds of witchy shit. Gimme some protein, I'm castin’ spells.”

  Her eyes welled. She managed to get her palm up to the side of Pony-boy's face. “I can't explain it to you,” she slurred. “I can, but I can't, you know?”

  Maybe there was something better he and the girl could be doing, Ponyboy replied.

  “People act like they're so bad,” she said.

  A bump. The ice cream truck over some sort of pothole.

  “Hurting each other, takin’ advantage for no reason. It just makes me, like I want to . . .”

  Her hand fluttered in front of his face now, casting an enchantment.

  “Destroy them motherfuckers.”

  As if her words truly carried the power to perform the act, the ice cream truck turned gravely quiet, its bustling and barking giving way to the flapping of the trash bag over the hole where the rear window should have been, the lulling consistency of tires speeding down a straightaway. Ponyboy looked at her with an intense defensiveness, a fierce disbelief. The truck momentarily drifted atop those raised lane marker bumps. The night whistled by, roadside mile markers and sagebrush and cacti and tumbleweeds in a piecemeal montage. Ponyboy kept staring at the girl, and the lava lamp's flickering crimson gleamed against the small balls of surgical steel on his brow. His mouth was half-illuminated, tightly shut. Stoic and intense, he seemed to consider what the girl had just said, a cover of clouds passing over him now, his eyes turning small and hard, the light inside of him seeming to extinguish, or rather, withdrawing, turning inward, like a movie theater going dark before the images begin to flicker and roll.

  6.3

  A long block with a twenty-four-hour sports club. Shrubbery, a parking lot.

  “Over there,” Newell said.

  “What?”

  “Dude, you see?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Slow down.”

  “What's going on?”

  “Just pull up to her, okay?” His voice was authoritative and dismissive at once. Kenny wasn't sure what to do, but followed orders, and slowed the FBImobile to ten miles an hour, approaching the bicyclist. Midway down the block, slowly pedaling.

  Down went the passenger window. “Hello?” said Newell. “Hey?”

  As the car pulled up, she remained curled on her perch, her T-shirt loose and drenched with sweat, her shorts made of the form-fitting Lycra of a serious cyclist.

  “Ma'am?” asked Newell.

  “What are—” Kenny asked, softly.

  “Please?” begged Newell.

  She finally gave in and looked. The boy paused, triumphant, trying to keep a straight face. “Do you know where the nearest gym is?”

  There was a long second between the end of the question and the extinguisher's appearance, just enough time for the bicyclist's expression to change, her puzzlement twisting into the tangibly awful sense that she'd been taken. But by then it was too late: white smoke was hissing outward from the compression nozzle; she was being engulfed; she was flailing; slow, exaggerated motions; leaning one way; tilting the bike and capsizing into one of the prickly, decorative ferns.

  The FBImobile screeched and its transmission didn't labor while jumping into third. Between wheezing laughs Newell called it a brutal facial, and let loose with a honking snort, the chlorine mist drifting from the extinguisher nozzle having little to do with his tears. Classic, he said, just about wetting himself. “What the fuck was that?” Kenny answered. “What the fuck are you doing?” Kenny's foot stayed on the gas and he shifted his eyes from the empty road to the rearview, and saw a guy running over from his car, vaulting the parking lot's miniature containing wall. In the rearview, the bright colors of the guy's workout clothes were shrinking into the darkness, but the guy kept sprinting—toward the dissipating white cloud; the guy crouching, taking the fallen woman into his arms.

  “Her own fault.” Newell looked back over his shoulder. A guilty cackle. “What's she doing EXERCISING so late?”


  By the end of the next block, Kenny finally was able to breathe, and had stopped looking into the rearview. Perched on the edge of the ripped upholstery, Newell appeared thrilled, absorbed, hunting for another target. His body language encouraged Kenny. He wasn't at all happy about what Newell had just done, what they'd just done. But it looked like the boy was in a better mood. So maybe everything was going to be all right after all. If a little mayhem was what it took to get things back to normal between them, Kenny was up for it.

  Maintaining a steady pace of thirty miles an hour and keeping in syncopation with the city's computerized traffic signals, the FBImobile eased through one green light after another, moving though empty intersections. Each new block was burdened with competing shopping plazas and chain stores, every one of them as large as a palace, anchored by twenty-four-hour supermarkets and wide-acred lots. Strip malls were dappled with neighborhood watering holes and their accompanying clusters of parked cars. Fast-food joints infected everywhere you looked. Attacking a drunk or someone in a car was too big a risk, it seemed to Kenny. Even on a major road like this, finding someone else to nail wasn't going to be a piece of cake.

  He kept driving and glanced out of the corner of his eye, and saw the boy poised, willfully focused. It seemed to Kenny that Newell's adrenaline rush had given way to a state of perpetual anticipation. Then again, Newell had his own reasons to be searching out there.

  Pier 1 Imports and Pottery Barn, Bank of America and Olive Garden, Supercuts and Blockbuster and Kinko's, the stores progressed and repeated, the blocks melded together, kind of like those cartoons where the same rock formations continually looped through the backdrop, but the coyote and roadrunner stayed in their stationary poses. Kenny pointed this out to Newell and received a halfhearted snort in reply. He kept heading north, crossing the two of them over some sort of unofficial line, into a new neighborhood, one of wholesale liquidators, cell phone and beeper emporiums. An all-night laundry center advertised its ten-cent slot machines. A lonely Elks lodge was sandwiched between competing shops that issued payday, title, and signature loans. Some stores, Kenny couldn't tell what they were, since their managers switched off the marquee lights at night, to save on the utility bill. Without all the residual neon, the sky was noticeably darker, giving storefronts the foreboding feel of a run-down warehouse district.

  On one lonesome corner, they found a Latino guy entertaining himself with slight, fluid hip-hop movements. “Mofo's packing,” Newell said, waving off the possibility. A block or so later, in front of a Western Union, a grizzled Asian man listlessly pushed a broom over the sidewalk. “Let him alone,” Kenny warned. “He has enough problems.”

  Ignoring Newell's cold shoulder and implied disapproval, Kenny guided the steering wheel with one hand, starting the FBImobile into the curving S of a road where every third streetlamp had burned out, been shot out, or had its fuse box gutted—a road whose navigation was second nature to Kenny, its pull all but tangible for him. He passed the exterminator office with the giant plaster cockroach fixed atop its roof, then the Salvation Army clothing store. He noticed Newell was rigid, the extinguisher positioned just beneath the passenger window. The FBI-mobile accelerated through a yellow light, and now the thoroughfare opened onto the clearing of eight-dollar-a-night parking lots. Looking up and ahead, Kenny took in the long dome covering Fremont Street, downtown's few casino towers gathered above the animated rainbow glow.

  Temporary shelters of cardboard and plywood were visible in the doorway of a liquor shop. Around the side of a bail bonds place, slumped bodies were covered by giveaway blankets. Here was a three-hundred-pound black woman falling out of a pair of tiny jean shorts. Moving unsteadily on silver high heels, she sauntered in front of a motel office, where three thugs were loitering. Pulling her shorts from her butt, she promptly whirled and flipped off the hooting men.

  She would have made a perfect target, could have been the opening Newell had been looking for. Instead the boy tightened in his seat. He brought the canister closer in to his body, an action that reminded Kenny of his aunt years ago—all the times the bus had moved into this territory, the countless times she'd clutched her purse just a little tighter.

  “I never come down here,” Newell said.

  How to respond? What could Kenny really say, other than, Yeah, you're right?

  For how long now had Kenny himself been put off by downtown's squalor? How many times had he been repulsed by the prospect of coming down here to get his aunt, vaguely afraid, insulted even—as if he were a cut better than this neighborhood, as if life had something better in store for him? How many times had Kenny seen similar things and wanted to disappear?

  As he struggled for an answer, Kenny felt more than this, too.

  Newell's distaste, his unpleasant manner and assumption of privilege, everything that lay beneath the boy's short declaration and slight motion. It made Kenny defensive, turned him territorial.

  Not long ago, Kenny's father had spent a week in one of the motels up ahead. Right after a stint in a halfway house, the old man had gotten himself cleaned up pretty good. Each day, when the pawn shop opened, he made sure he was waiting for Kenny's aunt, hoping to convince her to get Kenny's mom to take him back. Hit by the memory now, Kenny found the story entertaining. With more than a little nostalgia, he recalled how furious the Jew's Daughter had been with Kenny's dad, she already had more than enough bums hanging around. The Jew's Daughter repeatedly ordered him out of the pawn shop, but Kenny's dad wouldn't leave, not without Kenny's aunt agreeing to help with his marital distress, which his aunt most certainly would not do. The whole thing turned into a real mess. Kenny's dad even ended up working at the pawn shop for a little while, sweeping the floor at the end of the day, wiping down the displays, and hosing off the sidewalk—activities that usually were done by a homeless black guy, Loveless, in exchange for five dollars. Of course, when Loveless showed up and saw Kenny's dad doing the tasks that he relied on—five bucks a day going right out the window—the two had almost come to blows, separating only when the Jew's Daughter took out a shotgun. In the end, Kenny's father and Loveless had compromised, splitting the responsibilities. They actually got along pretty well for a while—until the police rounded up all the homeless people and Loveless disappeared, which was a different story.

  It would not have been difficult for Kenny to tell Newell about this minor comic nightmare. The stories he had forgotten about the pawn shop would have entertained Newell until puberty kicked in.

  But it occurred to Kenny that when Newell said, I never come down here, what he'd really meant to do was ask, Why are we down here?

  He'd wanted to know: What are we doing?

  What are you going to do to me now?

  Downtown was upon them, hotels and towers packed into that dense square district, tour buses parked like gigantic, end-to-end dominos along the right side of the street. A bombastic patriotic jingle blared through the overhead speakers, emanating from the open-air mall of Fremont Street, where the animation loop was running—red and white stars flowing down a sky-blue backdrop, cartoon fighter jets traversing the length of the street. Not too many people were beneath the dome to watch—a lone woman, elderly and stooped, had put down her overstuffed shopping bags and was looking up; a pair of undefined gambling fiends were making their way around a shut-down souvenir cart. A few other miscreants were out there, too, swerving and staggering, the drunken dregs, the losers and the lost and those who knew they would keep on losing, yet were powerless to stop themselves. Newell was watching it all without betraying the slightest emotion, at least he was putting up a good front—Kenny knew him well enough to recognize that's what it was: the boy tightly constricted, visibly failing in his efforts to keep his fears at bay. He was so obviously susceptible, so tangibly vulnerable. Kenny was overcome with how young Newell actually was. His throat caught and he swallowed dryly.

  If he made an immediate right turn and went down the short alleyway, the car would em
erge on the other side of the pawn shop. But unlike hundreds and maybe thousands of times before this, he drove past the turn, did not so much as look in the direction of the shop.

  Newell's chin rose. His head turned a degree or two, and he stayed with the sight above the entrance to a sports-themed casino. A huge bronze statue, posed like the centerpiece of an oversize trophy. A baseball player, front knee forward, arms extended, following through on his perfect home run swing.

  “This one time, the mayor wanted to make more tourists come down here?” Kenny started unsteadily. “The cops got ordered to round up all the homeless people from Fremont Street. I don't know if you remember this. I guess the cops went through downtown and loaded all the bums onto police buses and gave them like a sack lunch. They dropped everyone off outside city limits. My aunt was thrilled. But the lady who runs the pawn shop? She got concerned. Turns out Loveless had already told her—word about the round-up was already out on the streets. When Loveless didn't show up to clean the windows for a week, the pawn shop lady complained.”

  In accordance with the flow of traffic Kenny eased off the accelerator. Two or three traffic signals ahead, large sand dunes and round cement pillars supported a system of ramps for an elevated series of freeways.