Dead Boys

by RICHARD LANGE

  Judy waits at the top of the stairs, arms crossed over her chest. She tenses as I climb toward her. I see all her muscles tighten at once.

  “Spencer,” she says.

  “I’m fine. He just grazed me. Gave me a bloody nose. It was nothing.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  She follows me into the apartment, back to the kitchen. I snatch up a dish towel and open the oven. The turkey’s just turning brown on top.

  “Where do you want to go to dinner?” I ask. “I’m buying.”

  “Stop it,” she says.

  I slide out the rack and lift the foil pan with the bird in it. The towel isn’t thick enough to stop the heat, though, and my fingers are on fire. I drop the pan onto the door of the stove, and it tips over onto the floor. The turkey hits the linoleum with a fleshy pop.

  “Spencer!” Judy yells, retreating to the hallway.

  “I’ll clean it up. Relax.”

  I go to the refrigerator and grab a cold beer to stop the burning in my fingers. When I try to walk over to calm Judy down, I slip on something, turkey grease, and fall on my ass, my head smashing into the cupboards. There is a moment of glorious darkness before the pain begins. I’d like to lie here for a while, but Judy is freaking.

  “Stop crying,” I snap as I struggle to my feet. We’ve somehow gone out of alignment. Things are rattling, shuddering, threatening to come apart. I pick up the turkey with the towel and stumble out the front door and down the stairs again. Steam is rising off the bird as I drop it into the blue recycling bin. An ice-cream truck passes by, playing “Jingle Bells.” I wave at the driver, and he just stares at me. What a mess I’ve made, trying to get everything back to normal. I almost laugh. The blisters rising on my fingertips begin to throb.

  Judy is in our bedroom, stuffing clothes into a suitcase. There’s nothing hurried about it. It seems like part of a longstanding plan suddenly put into dogged motion.

  “Hey, come on now,” I say.

  “I’m going to Vince and Kylie’s,” she replies without looking at me. Her tears have stopped, and I want to touch her, but my arms can’t reach that far. I feel like I have to yell to be heard, though she’s standing right in front of me.

  “Who?”

  “Friends from work.”

  I trail her down the hall, limping and dizzy. She pauses at the front door, and here it is, my last chance.

  “It’s you and me again,” I say.

  “I can’t. I can’t anymore.”

  “Let’s celebrate.”

  “I’m afraid of where you’re headed.”

  “Karl, right? Am I fucking right?”

  Her face flushes, and she holds her hand up, palm outward. “You are fucking crazy.”

  “Shhh,” I say. “Not in front of the kids.” I gesture at the photos of her dead relatives over the couch.

  The door slams in my face. I close my eyes and listen to her footsteps grow fainter as she walks down the stairs.

  I SPREAD MY booty on the coffee table. The candy bars from the other night, three pine tree car deodorizers, assorted cigarette lighters and drink cozies, a can of Vienna sausages, Karl’s snow globe. Silly shit. Junk.

  A football game plays on the muted television. Wherever it is, it’s snowing. Drifts are forming on the sidelines and flakes stick to the camera lens, blurring the action. I stand and draw a pair of six-shooters from imaginary holsters on my hips, empty them into the set. Then I pretend I’m on my way to the moon. I tiptoe around the living room in slow motion, holding my breath and feigning weightlessness.

  The phone rings. It’s my father.

  “I want to warn you that Karl may be on his way out there to look for you. Do you remember him? He’s just been released from prison, and he showed up here unannounced a while back.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Fuck you.”

  Karl’s duffel bag is under the magazine rack at the end of the couch. I unroll it and sort through his possessions. I put on one of his T-shirts and a pair of his socks. And Judy. Oh, Judy. Who knew you, too, had dreams of escape? And who knew yours would come true?

  Telephone Bird

  IN A DECENT WORLD, LOSING THE CAR WOULD HAVE been the last knot in that particular string of bad luck. The Denver boot they called it, and there it was one morning, big and orange and clamped to the left rear wheel of my Nissan. What kind of nastiness was that? A few unpaid parking tickets and they came down on you with a sledgehammer?

  Bobby didn’t answer. The joint he’d smoked half an hour earlier had put him into a scientific frame of mind, and he held two dead leaves he’d found on the prickly yellow lawn out at arm’s length, shifting his gaze between them.

  “You know what I did?” I continued, not worried if I seemed to be rambling a bit, as it was just the two of us. “I slashed the tires and cut every hose in the engine. I put dirt in the gas tank and took a screwdriver to the radiator, turned it into a sieve. What they towed away was a junker they won’t even be able to auction off. They’ll have to sell it as scrap. This is the new me, you see. Things used to happen to me; now I make things happen.”

  “You were crying, though,” Bobby said, still intent on the leaves.

  “Hello?”

  “I heard you.”

  “Give me a break.”

  Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. He’d made it all the way to law school before his brain seized up. Now he watched too much television and labored over a trilogy of novels chronicling the Great Elven Wars of a land called Tybor. There was no sweeter kid if he took his medication and stayed away from hard liquor, but you wanted to shake him sometimes when his memory went spotty.

  A bird cut loose with a trilling electronic chirp, and I nudged Bobby and pointed in the direction of the sound, somewhere near the shed at the back of the yard. It was this bird we were looking for, the one that had somehow learned to mimic the ring of my telephone. The first time it had perched outside my window just after sunrise and twittered that way, I’d sat up in bed and grabbed the receiver, certain that the temp agency was calling with a last-minute assignment. Since then, there’d been many more such false alarms, and my patience had been exhausted.

  Because it was my problem, I took the lead. As stealthily as Hollywood Indians, we crept from apricot tree to lemon tree to avocado tree, finally crouching next to the rickety outbuilding. The boards of it were warm through my shirt, and I couldn’t believe how much I was sweating.

  I peeked around the corner, where an old orange tree twisted out of the ground. Then, lying on my back, I wormed myself to the base of the tree’s trunk, my eyes fixed on the confusion of leaves and branches swaying against the sky’s blue blankness.

  There! Its little chest puffed, its throat swelled, and out came the ring. I watched the bird bustle from branch to branch, a feathered twitch, more motion than mass, until a sudden ripping tumult frightened it away. The fist-size rock responsible dropped from the tree and landed too close to my head.

  “I get him?” Bobby asked.

  “Well, he knows he’s not wanted now, anyway. That might do the trick.”

  I was trying to be hopeful in those days, you see, hopeful but forceful.

  THE BIRD WAS back the very next morning, ring, ring, ringing, at the crack of dawn. Again I snapped awake, paranoia an icicle lodged in my bowels, my lower body puckered and clenched. The bill collectors were prohibited from harassing me under the terms of the bankruptcy, but the damage had already been done. At the end, right before I filed, they were calling all the time, some even threatening me. “You never got in over your head?” I’d scream at them. “You never had a beautiful wife you couldn’t say no to?”

  The trap in the shower was clogged with hair, and someone had watered down my milk again, to hide their pilfering. Emma, the owner of the house, came into the kitchen while I was stewing over my cornflakes. She had her church dress on. She’d been a nun until 1988, and still went to Mass every day.

/>   “Want some tea?” she asked. Water screamed out of the tap, thudded into the kettle.

  “The milk fairies have been at it again,” I said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Five people in one house is just too many.”

  “That depends on the people.”

  Emma smelled funny. Everything smelled funny. A hundred years’ worth of grease hung in the air, a slick of it settling on top of my coffee. What strangeness a man could get used to.

  “I have to move out,” I said. “This place is killing me.”

  “We’d sure miss you. Scrabble wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Don’t look,” Sandal yodeled on his way to the refrigerator. He was wearing nothing but a pair of red bikini briefs. There was a house rule about that, about running around half-naked, but Sandal ignored it. He lived rent-free in the biggest room on the second floor in exchange for acting as handyman, and this, he felt, entitled him to certain privileges.

  He leaned against the counter and tipped a container of yogurt into his mouth. With his ponytail and those panties and the dusty morning light, he could have been a woman in some screwy dream.

  “Are you working today?” he asked me.

  “No, Sandal,” I replied. “I always dress for breakfast.”

  “No, really, how much are they paying you? Because this friend of mine hooked me up with an extra gig on this movie. I can probably get you on, too, and maybe Bobby. We’d make like seventy-five dollars.”

  “Thanks, but I already committed.”

  Emma brought her tea to the table and sat in the chair across from me. She was a nice lady, I liked her, but still I felt a little crowded. My knee wobbled, and the soles of my feet itched.

  “What’s the movie about?” she asked.

  “It’s a postnuclear deal, L.A. after the bomb and all that. I’m one of the zombies.”

  Emma smiled, then bowed her head. She lifted the rosary hanging around her neck to her lips as she whispered a prayer over her tea. I glanced at Sandal, ready to exchange smirks, but his head was ducked, too. I waited until they’d finished to light a cigarette.

  I WAS WORD processing for the gas company that week. The regular employees were out on strike, and every morning and evening we scabs were bused through an angry picket line. The strikers spat and cursed at us as we passed, their faces monstrous with rage, like those you see on the news, in footage from other countries. With rumors of guns in the throng, we rode most of the way bent double, hugging our knees, and I wondered if this was what war felt like. Afterward the bus’s windows would be glazed with snot and broken eggs that caught the sun and sparkled almost prettily.

  SANDAL CROUCHED OVER a triple-beam scale placed on the coffee table, dividing a pound of marijuana into quarters and eighths. This was one of his jobs as handyman, because in addition to renting out rooms in her house, Emma also dealt small quantities of sinsemilla to a select and established clientele. Both Sandal and Bobby — sunk deep in a recliner, profoundly stoned — were still in makeup from their movie roles. Their faces glowed a purulent yellow and were riven with thick-lipped, oozy gashes.

  “We looked even better on the set,” Sandal said. “With these gnarly false teeth and contact lenses.”

  His elbow directed me to a stack of Polaroids he’d taken during the shoot: Skyscrapers in flames. Hordes of malformed creatures running riot. He and Bobby sharing a pint of bourbon, a severed head shrieking in the gutter between them.

  “So it’s a documentary,” I joked, thinking of the picket line.

  A baseball game fizzed on the big-screen television. It was an archaic projection model, and the lenses had been knocked out of alignment long before I’d moved in, so that three pitchers, red, green, and blue, occupied the mound at the same time, throwing to three overlapping batters. It helped to be high if you were going to watch it, and I wanted to see the game, so I reached for the joint Sandal offered.

  How nicely the couch cradled me then, like the softest cloud. I lost track of the game, charting the snaky creep of darkness across the rug and up the wainscoting. The black tide slopped over onto the wallpaper, drowning the roses row by row, and I was right there when it reached the ceiling, the only witness as night overtook us. My head tingled with exciting plans for the future, and if I’d had a pen, I might have written them down.

  AFTER THE GAME Bobby and I walked to the liquor store for a six-pack. The gang members who lived in the house up the block were gathered around a car parked at the curb, trying to install a stereo by flashlight. I whispered that perhaps we should cross the street, but Bobby refused.

  “It’s my neighborhood, too,” he said.

  The gangsters grew sullen as we approached. I stiffened my arms and clenched my fists. I crammed my hands into my pockets and pulled them out again. I made my face as blank as it could be. Grim stares greeted us as we drew abreast of the gangsters. Tattooed fingers tightened around wrenches and screwdrivers.

  “Hey, ese, you seen a puppy? A little pit bull?” This from a fat kid sitting on the hood of the car, holding a fat, naked baby.

  “Not us,” Bobby replied. “No puppy.”

  “Don’t be shitting me.”

  “I’m not shitting you.”

  We were past them then, and gravity decreased with each step we took, as if we were hopping from planet to planet. Somewhere around Pluto everything went back to normal, and I was ashamed of being afraid. It was my neighborhood, too, after all.

  The Korean man at the liquor store winced and averted his eyes when we brought the beer to the register. I understood why upon catching a glimpse of Bobby in the security mirror over the door. He was still wearing his makeup, and it was awful under the fluorescents.

  “Take me to your leader,” Bobby said to the Korean, handing him our money.

  The Korean examined him more closely, then laughed. “Trick or treat,” he said. “Okay, I know trick or treat.”

  He called to his wife, who was watching a portable TV behind the counter. She gave a little scream when she saw Bobby and almost fell off the milk box she’d been sitting on. The Korean laughed even harder, his shoulders jumping up and down.

  I SMOKED ANOTHER joint, drank a couple beers, and decided to turn in. Foster was frying eggs and bacon when I stopped by the kitchen for a bowl of ice cream to take with me to my room. He worked nights unloading trucks and claimed to be a Hells Angel. Shortly after I’d moved in, he’d accused me of stealing his radio and punched me in the mouth. Emma said she’d throw him out unless he apologized, and we’d been okay with each other since then, though I suspected it was he who was sneaking my milk.

  “The Donster,” he said. “Donald Duck.”

  “Foster Freeze. The bee’s knees.”

  I heated a spoon by running hot water over it, then dug out a few thick curls of ice cream. Foster hissed to get my attention. He drew a pistol from the waistband of his jeans and slid it under a towel on the counter.

  “That’s for you, for the bird,” he whispered. “Don’t let Emma see it, or she’ll freak.”

  “Jesus, Foster.”

  “It’s just a pellet gun. Like you had when you were a kid.”

  The pistol felt creepy in my hand, and when I stuck it in my pants the sharp edges of it scraped my stomach.

  “Watch out,” Foster said, dropping a slice of bread into the frying pan to soak up the bacon fat. “The Donald’s packing.”

  I passed Bobby’s room on my way upstairs. He was talking to himself, and I put my ear to the door to listen.

  “No!” he said. “No! No! You won’t get past me. You won’t get past me.”

  It sounded like he was off his meds again.

  THE PHOTOGRAPH I chose for target practice showed my wife and me on the beach in Mexico. Our last trip before the credit card companies cut us off. The memory of how happy I’d been then sometimes kept me awake late into the night. And her — radiant is the word people use to describe such a smile. It was a smile you believed, or I
had, anyway.

  I leaned the picture against my pillow and crouched at the foot of the bed. The pistol sighed sharply each time I squeezed the trigger. I blew both our heads off, then shot the beach up just for the hell of it. When I flipped the picture over, the scattering of raised perforations left by the pellets reminded me of braille. I closed my eyes and ran my fingertips across them. When the money ran out, Cathy did, too. There should have been signs. I should have seen them.

  I turned out the light, and the darkness tightened around me, sticky as a spider’s web. Lying in bed, I drew circles in the air with the cherry of my cigarette while every sound I’d ever heard in my life poured through the open window at once. I chose a single thread of the clamorous snarl to concentrate on; the plashy roar of the ocean, it might have been, or teardrops striking asphalt, amplified a thousand times. My rude lullaby.

  WE WERE ON our way in one morning when the strikers broke through the police cordon and began rocking the bus. Glass shattered and a woman screamed. I lifted my face off my knees to watch somebody crawl up the aisle, an Indian named Subhash. He pressed a hand to the side of his head, blood and hair between his fingers.

  “They have killed me,” he wailed.

  He rose to his knees as the driver gunned the engine to make a run for the gate. The sudden lurch slammed him onto his back, and he lay there silent and still. The driver ordered us not to move him, which meant that some of us had to step over his body to disembark.

  Word went around later that he was fine — his cut had been fixed with a Band-Aid — but that he’d been so frightened he’d wet his pants. Curtis, whose terminal was next to mine, couldn’t stop talking about it. He felt sure Subhash would sue for stress and humiliation and wind up collecting a million dollars.

  “Motherfucker gets a million for pissing,” he said. “I’m gonna shit myself tomorrow, see if I can get two.”

  Someone else heard Subhash had died, but that the company was keeping it secret. You’d be surprised how many people wanted to believe that one.