by Laura Bickle
People also give them to me. Before he died, my brother gave me one every year for my birthday. I never asked where he got them. After he died, Carl wordlessly took over the tradition. Last year, Carl gave me one from Ohio. It has an old-timey airplane that the Wright Brothers flew. The year before that, he gave me one from Hawaii. You’d better believe I treasure the hell outta that.
The thing I love most about my wall of license plates is being able to touch them. With the Bunko, I can close my eyes to see and feel all these different places. I can see an air force base in Ohio, a country road in Kentucky. I glimpse flickers of Mount Rushmore, glimmers of the Grand Canyon, and the reflection of the sun on skyscrapers in New York City. I have a plate that went to Sturgis and one that went to Burning Man. I can see all kinds of things just by touching them, things I’ve never experienced. Things I probably never will. But it’s amazing to see these places. Especially the volcano from the Hawaii plate, the palm trees and the beaches with sand that looks like sugar.
Most of the time, I hate the Bunko. But like with Bert’s ice cream truck, there are some slivers of good things. Things like this show me what a big world it really is.
The Bunko is like that, up and down. Mostly down, lately.
It’s only a matter of time before my dad asks Carl or me to do some analysis on that hourglass he haggled over. I might refuse to do it, just out of spite—maybe.
I kick my shoes off and let my mind drift as I set them beside the bed. They’re motorcycle boots from an Army guy. I can sometimes get images of him zipping along enemy lines, with the wind and bullets whistling behind him.
I take off my belt. The belt buckle is from the Russian Revolution. There’s a dent in it that came from a bullet. The buckle saved the soldier’s life. I can sometimes make out an image of him staring down at the buckle, touching the hot lead in the silver metal, an expression of elation on his face.
Finally, I reach into my back pocket for my wallet and sit cross-legged on the bed, holding it between my palms. I take a deep breath.
This is the hardest part of the Bunko, the ritual I play out every night. I make myself do it. I guess you could say it’s an obsession. Or compulsion. Something like that. Carl calls it masochism.
I hold my dead brother’s wallet between my hands. There’s a dark spot on the well-worn spine of it that’s actually blood, but no one except me ever notices.
I close my eyes and count to five.
Sometimes, I see scenes from Zach’s life that make me smile. Zach getting his driver’s license and then immediately drag-racing down the street in front of the DMV. Hot afternoons playing basketball on the school asphalt. Zach and Bert coming home with a Christmas tree one year as a surprise, a limp spruce tied to the top of the ice cream truck. They parked on the curb and ran the jingle until Carl and I came outside in our pajamas, rubbing sleep from our eyes. I savor memories like those.
But tonight, I’m transported to the night he was killed.
CHAPTER 7
It always begins in darkness, this fragment of recollection from the wallet.
It’s not that I haven’t seen other things with it, happier times. But the strongest memory associated with that wallet, the one that’s stamped into the grain of the leather by some crazy trick of quantum physics or magic, is the night Zach died. He had the wallet in his back pocket when he was killed, and hours later, I remember staring at it in a paper bag of his possessions at the hospital.
The wallet takes me back to a set of railroad tracks in the dark. I’m twelve years old, and Zach is eighteen. We’re running along the tracks, and there’s shouting behind us. I’m jumping from tie to tie as I run, trying to avoid the gravel that slides under my shoes. I’m slower than my big brother, who runs like a goddamn gazelle along the tracks.
He turns around, yelling, “C’mon, Raz...keep up!”
In the dimness, he is as he’s always been—wearing a leather jacket, his hair cut in a flattop. He’s getting ready to go into the military. Dad isn’t happy about it. But Zach is determined to get the hell out of Starboard City, see the world. He lost the Bunko a long time ago, and has no love for the pawn shop.
I struggle to keep up. My older brother is everything I’m not: tall, ballsy, strong. And tonight, as usual, I hobble behind. I’m wearing a pair of high-top sneakers from the 1980s that’ve come off pawn. I cherish them—they’re neon orange Reeboks, and I think they’re incredibly cool. Problem is, they’re a size too big, and the laces keep coming undone and tripping me up.
It doesn’t help that we have people chasing us, either.
Three men are pursuing us. Their flashlight beams bounce up and down as they run. They’re security guards from the Blue Goddess Casino. Zach and I were leaving the arcade when we spied a license plate from Montana in the parking garage.
“You want it?” Zach asks as we passed by a shiny blue Beemer in valet parking.
I stare at the cowboy on the plate. My fingers twitch. I wonder if it’s seen ranches, buffalo. Real cowboys. I can’t resist. “Sure. Sure, I want it.”
Zach looks over his shoulder, digs his knife out of his pocket. He’s just jammed the blade behind the screw when the car alarm goes off.
I jump eight feet in the air, tripping over my orange laces. “Let’s go!” I hiss.
“I’ve almost got it!” Zach grunts, tugging at the metal.
I slap him on the shoulder. “Shit! Guards!” They must’ve seen us on camera the instant we walked past.
We leave the Montana plate dangling on the back of the car by one screw and take off through the garage. We jump over a concrete retaining wall, into an overgrown yard, and down by the railroad tracks. I’m certain those crazy rent-a-cops won’t follow us down there, but they do...the Montana car must belong to a high-roller, and they aren’t going to let us go after a block of huffing and puffing. We run from the landbound tracks onto a railroad bridge, suspended above the streets in wood and rusted metal.
My shoelace catches on something, and I fall face-forward into the railroad ties. I hit so hard that my bottom teeth cut through my upper lip. I see stars and taste blood. My face and hands burn.
I’m fuzzy on what happens after that, but the wallet shows Zach standing over me. In the distance, there’s light. Train coming. The flashlights pursuing us hop off the track, well before the rusty apparatus of the bridge.
Zach tries to pull me up as I try not to cry. My face is full of blood, and I know that our dad will be furious with an ER bill.
But my foot is jammed. I cry out. The laces have wound around my ankle and caught on a metal spike embedded in the railroad tie.
Zach swears. He’s always a good swearer. Pops always says he should become a sailor. He wrenches at my foot, but it won’t slip free of the shoe.
The train is honking. Jesus, it can see us, but it isn’t going to be able to stop in time. I whimper and shove at my brother, terrified. Zach gets out his knife and slashes at my foot. I scream at him to run, to get away from the light and screeching sound bearing down on us. But he can’t hear me, not in all that darkness and roar. I’m dead meat. We both know it, but he refuses to believe.
I shove him as hard as I can. I shove him to get him to quit screwing with my shoe and get the hell away, to cling to the handrail sketched out in the darkness. He can cling to it until the train passes...
I think that’s my plan, but it’s hard as hell to strategize when you’ve got that much adrenaline boiling through your system, your throat is raw from screaming, the tracks are shaking, and that light is throwing shadows against the trestles.
When I shove him, my shoelace splits open. I throw him off balance, and Zach goes pitching into the crazily-spinning shadows. I jump after him, leaving my shoe behind me.
The train rushes past in a thunder of wind and a shower of sparks from the brakes. I slam against the guardrail, hold on as tight as I can while all that wind sucks past me. I can’t breathe. Dirt and air scald me, tearing at my skin and clo
thes. I clutch that piece of rusting steel with both arms. My feet are swept out beneath me, and I cling, tears streaming from my eyes.
And that terrible force moves past me. I can feel it pulsing, the change in air pressure as the cars sweep past. I don’t know how many. Whump, whump, whump...the cars flash by, the vibration shaking my teeth and my heart. It’s as if some terrible beast tears at me, ripping at me with claws of sound.
When it passes, I can’t hear anything but ringing in my ears. I struggle to put both my feet on the edge of the platform. My sock-covered foot missing a shoe curls on the cold metal.
I look right and left for Zach. I expect to see him grinning at me, exhilarated by my terror and shouting some smart-ass comment.
I don’t see him.
I stare down in horror at the tracks, expecting to see his mangled body. Nothing. The train grinds to an inexorable halt ahead, among sparks from the engine brakes.
I spin back to the guardrail, look down.
Zach’s body sprawls on the pavement below. He looks like a crushed spider, twisted and leggy and bathed in the sulfurous streetlight four stories below.
I scream.
It’s a scream that summons the train engineer, jumping out of the stopped train almost a mile down the tracks and charging toward me. It’s a scream that calls the security guards, their flashlights bouncing over the dark landscape.
It’s a scream that does absolutely no good, for it cannot bring back the dead.
“RAZ.”
I hold the wallet between my hands like I’m praying. I open my hands and my eyes at the sound of Carl’s voice. The wallet slips from my grip, and my brother’s driver’s license and a few battered pictures of our mother fan out in their plastic sleeves. There’s one of me and Carl in there, too, playing in a fire hydrant when we were little kids. He wasn’t usually that overtly sentimental, but before he shipped off to the military, Zach’d been surreptitiously gathering pictures to keep.
Carl stands before me, holding a sleeping bag. Despite his size, with the faded bag folded over his arms, he seems very young.
It’s a 1980s vintage sleeping bag of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. He-Man is fighting Skeletor, swinging his sword at his skull-faced enemy, with Castle Grayskull in the background. It has memories of a little boy’s Christmas morning attached. Lots of action figures and red wrapping paper and pajamas with feet. The smell of ham. There’s also a dog who ate a bag full of Christmas candy and fell asleep on someone’s stocking.
“They didn’t tell me he was dead,” I whisper.
Carl watches me solemnly. So does He-Man, grimacing in battle. Neither of them says anything.
“They didn’t let me go near him after he fell. The engineer held me back while the security guards went down there. The cops wouldn’t let me. Neither would the ambulance driver. I knew...” My voice sounds uneven. “I knew that something was terribly wrong when they didn’t run the siren. I knew, but I didn’t know until they took me to the hospital. My dad was there. I didn’t know until he started crying.” I can’t continue.
No one ever really told me that Zach was dead. My dad just led me by the hand to a room where a sheet was draped over him. He told me that it was important to say goodbye. My dad had never been good at shielding me from things, and this was no exception. Zach’s face was all cut up and scraped, but I couldn’t see the rest of his body under the sheet. He just looked like he was sleeping. Except for a red stain on the sheet that leaked out around his knee. I thought that if he was bleeding, he should still be alive.
And that’s when I really lost it. I think they had to tranquilize me or something, because I don’t remember much until I woke up at home in my bed. Bert was sitting in a chair beside my bed, reading Great Expectations.
To this day, I can’t stand the idea of anyone watching me sleep.
Carl reaches out and puts a hand on my shoulder. He doesn’t touch the wallet. He never has, and doesn’t want to. He knows what I did, and that knowledge is enough. He doesn’t want to see it.
“Do you mind if...if I sleep in here?” His voice is very small. And then I’m conscious that I am the oldest now, and have been for a long time. As much as I look to Carl to swat the flies off me, he still needs me for some things. Like I needed Zach. He needs me to be the stronger guy.
I nod. “Sure. But no spooning, man.”
“Dude. I just want the floor.”
“All yours.”
I put the wallet on my desk. I occasionally sleep with it under my pillow, but if my hand brushes it at night when my guard is down, the Bunko sometimes switches on. It’s strange. I need to have that part of him close at hand, to remind me. I don’t want to forget what Zach’s face looks like or what his voice sounds like. I’m very afraid of that. If I go too long without opening the wallet, who he is sort of dims in my head.
Carl shakes out the sleeping bag on my floor. I toss my extra pillow down for him. He wriggles into the sleeping bag and jams the pillow under his head. The sleeping bag only comes up to his armpits and stretches over his chest. I pull my blankets over me and switch off the desk lamp.
Truth be told, I’m glad he’s here. The sound of his breathing in the darkness is sort of comforting. I stare up at the rafters and imagine Hoodie roaming in the darkness, thinking about his power over life and death. Where the hell was he when my brother died? Was there no dark bargain to be struck then?
I can’t close my eyes. I’m staring up at the blackness, waiting for something to move. The cartoon image of Skeletor on my cousin’s sleeping bag glows in the dark, giving the shape of a disembodied skull shining in the darkness. It moves up and down with every breath Carl takes.
Finally, I reach over to my desk and switch on the computer monitor. It flickers to life, casting a thin blue light into the darkness. It keeps some of those shadows at bay. Not that I’d ever admit it.
I pull the covers up to my chin.
On the floor, Carl sighs. “Thanks, man.”
“Sure thing. That’s me. Bringer of Light.” Carl can’t see my scowl.
“Go the fuck to sleep. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
I GUESS PART OF ME hopes for a calm discussion around the kitchen table, with sunshine and orange juice and buttered toast. I hope Bert will find a loophole out of the deal, that everything will be better in the morning.
Fat chance.
I awaken to the sound of arguing. Not just an argument. A full-fledged, knock-down drag-out scream-fest with butter and syrup. My first impulse is to call the cops or yell for Bert to bounce whoever’s downstairs creating all the ruckus. But as I lie in bed and listen, I recognize my dad’s voice, Sid’s, and the low drone of Bert’s eminently-reasonable growling in the background.
I stare up at the rafters. “Fuck.”
From the floor, tangled in his He-Man sleeping bag, Carl agrees with me. “Fuck.”
I roll out of bed to reach for my shoes. “Sounds like Bert told your dad what happened.”
Carl struggles to unzip the sticking zipper on the sleeping bag, thrashing against Skeletor and He-Man. “No time like the present to know that we’re all in debt to a...whatever the hell that guy in the hoodie is.”
“I guess we’ll find out.”
We creep down the stairs, both of us trying not to make much noise. It’s absurd, really...I feel like we’re little kids eavesdropping on our dads’ poker game. But this is no game, and we’re all a lot older. Though maybe not wiser.
“...knowing what you know, I cannot fucking believe you would sell our futures to a demon.” That’s unmistakably Sid’s voice, but I’ve never heard that tone in it before. It’s hot, seething hatred. And he’s talking to my father. “You not only sold the future of our sons, but perhaps their sons.”
“The demon said the boys were safe. And you and me.” My dad’s voice is underlined by a slap of a hand on a glass case. “I did what I had to do.”
“But what the hell about the future?” Sid d
emands. “That deal you made might protect them. But it doesn’t protect anyone else. Not their mothers. Not our children’s wives, or their children...not Bert. Not Mrs. Renfelter or the girls next door. And you have no idea what that piece of trash blown in from hell might demand of any of us in the future.”
“Look,” my dad protests. “There’s always a way out. Always.”
That’s my dad: a wheeler-dealer to the end, no matter how high the stakes are.
“There’s no way out,” Bert murmurs. “You swore in blood. In blood the deal remains.”
A fist slams down on the case again. Something rolls off and shatters. Sid’s voice is low, lower than Bert’s, and hissing. “Did you not learn anything from the last time? You can’t deal with them and win. Our dad is an old man. You have to just let him die.”
I take a deep breath and walk out of the hallway. Carl’s footsteps thump behind me. I’m not going to cower like a child while the adults bargain away my future. “What was the last time?”
My dad, Sid, and Bert turn toward me. The color drains out of my father’s face when he sees me.
Broken crystal glitters on the carpet. My dad is behind the counter, and Sid is before it. Good thing it’s between them. The hourglass perches on the counter, white sands streaming down in an endless trickle. Must be an illusion. Or magic. Bert’s wearing clothes again and standing upright, pacing the floor.
Sid gestures at me. “You need to tell him, Roger. You need to tell him the truth about what you’ve done.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “He made a deal with the devil, and we’re gonna have to pay it back. I know.”