Blood Relations (13 page)

“Finish your lunch first,” I said.

He shook his head. “Can’t. Feel like I’m gonna puke now.”

He certainly couldn’t be much help, but I was glad to have him. I gave Toy a salute, and started leading Sully out of the caf. He was a little hunched over already.

“Jesus
Christ
!” Toy yelled, like a father, as he followed.

When we got to the house, I stood on the steps looking up at the door. The two of them stood a few feet behind me.

“He won’t be in there. He works, right?” Toy asked.

“I really think I’m gonna be sick,” Sully moaned. “You don’t need to go in, I just got some new sweaters for my birthday... they always give me sweaters... I never wear them...”

I didn’t go in. I turned, brushed by them, and went around to the back. By the time Toy caught up to me, I was on my hands and knees in the grass, looking at it. Trying to remember the little shredded May Day goat. If it really could have happened.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Goat’s blood.”

“Excuse?”

“The brown stuff here, it came out of a goat.”

He stared down at me as I snuffled around like a mole.

“Mick, what are we doing here? You look insane, man. Get up.”

He stuck out his hand and pulled me up. Sully came tearing into the yard, waving his arms and desperately trying to yell and whisper at the same time.

“I saw a move I saw a move I saw a move, goddamnit, I saw a move. Let’s get outta here.”

“Sully, don’t make me slap you,” I said. “What did you see?”

“A move. I saw a move. In the house. In your room, I think. Somebody opened the curtain, and closed it again quick. He’s here, goddamnit, he’s here. How could you do this to me, goddamnit, let’s get the—”

“It’s probably just my mother, Sul.”

“Uh-uh. It
ain’t
your mother. I only caught a peek, but it ain’t her.”

I felt my face flush. I made a fist, opened it again, curled it, opened it. I found myself rising up on the balls of my feet.

“What’s in it for you?” Toy asked sternly.

I barely heard him. “Huh?”

“This isn’t going to do you any good. This is a loser game, Mick. I don’t think you should go in.”

“Ya, I don’t think so either, don’t think you should, don’t think you should, don’t think so,” Sully reasoned.

“You can wait, or you can leave,” I said, stomping around to the front door.

They followed me, closer than before. Even Sully was hanging tight, even if he was making little nervous whimper noises under his breath.

I stuck my key in the door, turned it, then swung around to Toy. I pointed my finger in his face.

“Don’t let me die,” I said. “But short of that, this is not your problem, it’s mine.”

He didn’t answer. He understood.

I swung the door open and stood staring in, like the cops do on TV when they go into a criminal’s place. Nothing happened, so I stepped in.

“Ma?” I said hopefully.

“Please, oh please answer,” Sully whispered.

Nothing. The house seemed normal as I stepped through. The front hall, the living room, the dining room. They were all the way they were when I still lived there. Terry and friends had put back all the overturned furniture, replaced the broken glass, sawdusted the vomit, grilled the scattered goat pieces—if they even bothered to cook it before eating—and let the dogs gnaw the bones down to unrecognizable nothing. It was all gone now, because it was Monday. And they were back to being carpenters and pipe fitters and telephone workers going into people’s houses and saying “Yes, ma’am” and “Thank you, ma’am” and “Sure, a Pepsi would be great because, y’know, a guy sure does get thirsty on a job like this” and “Yes, sir, it’s a dirty shame what’s become of the Celtics since Bird and McHale retired. Disgusting, can’t even watch ’em no more.”

They were good at what they did. They ravaged like Hell’s Angels, then they swept up like Merry Maids. There were only the two messy details. One was me, and I actually did them a favor by removing myself. The other was the smell. The smell of the booze saturating the place, seeping into the rugs, of dogs too drunk to remember to go outside, of beer-bellied psychopaths who don’t bathe all weekend and who can’t wait for the bathroom line so they piss in the kitchen sink. Try as he might, over the years, Terry never found a way to deal with that smell so it hung there for two or three or four weeks, haunting that house with its sickness until it faded.

I shook my head and gagged at the same time as I smelled the whole can of potpourri air freshener my mother had lamely layered on top of it all.

Sully and Toy hovered in the front doorway for a while, but when I headed for the bedrooms, Toy came up behind me. Terry’s door was open.

The room was empty. For a second I thought I was going to cry as I approached his bed. I stood there, looking down on where he’d be. The same spot where I last saw his drunk, evil, unhuman ass. I kicked the bed, like I’d kicked his ribs. I kicked it again.

I felt Toy’s presence back there. I wasn’t sure where he was. But I knew he was close.

“I
would
have killed him, Toy. I would have done it.”

His voice came from a couple of feet back. “And I would have let you. If I thought you could get away with it.”

Across the hall, we heard the noise. In my bedroom.

“Shit,” Toy said. It was the first time I’d ever seen him really surprised.

“Shit,” Sully echoed from way off. “Shit. Shit.”

I pushed by Toy and threw open the door to my room.

Like a hairy brown missile, the beast threw itself at me without a sound. I yanked the door shut just in time for him to crash against it.

Sully had run out the front door already, and was peeking back in.

“What is it?” Toy asked, angrily, like whatever the hell it was, he wanted to fight it.

“It’s a goddamn dog, I think,” I said, my chest inflating and deflating with terror. I listened with my back to the door as the thing scratched and pawed around, then stopped. I cracked the door and peeked in.

He sat curled on the floor under the window, the curtain hanging above him chewed to pieces. He raised his arrow-shaped head toward me and curled one lip to snarl without sound. My bedposts were chewed to splinters. There was a fresh shit in the middle of the rug. My stereo cabinet was tipped over and my bedspread was on the floor, covered with dog hair. I closed the door quietly.

“It looks like part Doberman, part shepherd,” I said. “It’s got paws the size of baseballs.” I leaned my forehead against the door. “He got himself a damn dog, and he gave it my room. And they
let
him.”

“Come on,” Sully said. He’d actually come all the way in now, and stood right behind me. “Come on, Mick. Let’s go home.”

I smiled at that—for the moment liked the sound of it. I stepped back from the door. My door. And there it was. Scrubbed, but still there. A watery pink blur now, but still plenty to remind me of the bloody note he’d left me.

“Not yet,” I said, and stormed back to Terry’s room. I went right for the top drawer of his bureau, underneath the twelve pairs of white socks with the green and yellow rings around the calf. I pulled out his bottle of Bushmills, the real thing, that he got on his trip to Ireland. I uncapped it.

“Oh, Mick, you don’t really want to do that, do you?” Toy asked.

I smiled at him, then upended the bottle, pouring great brown spirals out on the already stained mattress.

“Yee-hah,” Sully said, clapping excitedly like one of those wind-up monkeys with cymbals.

“But is he even going to notice?” Toy laughed.

I got more wired. I did more. I had to do more. There wasn’t enough.

I whipped it out. I pissed in the bottle.

It grew in my hand, I was so mental excited. I almost couldn’t get the right stuff out, but I did, filling the bottle about a third full. I capped the bottle and put it back in the drawer, closed the drawer, and fell to the floor laughing.

I laughed alone. Sully stared at me with a scared look. Toy stayed cool.

“And I’ll say it again,” he said. “Will he even know the difference?”

I laughed and laughed and laughed.

“Tell me something, Mick. Pissing in a bottle, did that make you feel like you got what you came for? Like you’re better than he is?”

I kept laughing, sitting there on the floor, almost crying. “No. It didn’t.”

I stopped laughing. “Sully, go get a couple of bags,” Toy said.

Sully went to the kitchen and came back with two shopping bags.

“What did you come here for, Mick?” Toy asked. “Come on, take what’s yours, man.”

I got up, remembered the dog in my old room, and almost sat down again. Then it came to me. Terry’s bureau was right at my back. I spun and started pulling open drawers.

He has about twenty pairs of new jeans. He wears two of them. I took ten. I took shirts. I took the two pastel sweatshirts my mother bought when she read that article on colors and aggression control. He’d thrown them at her. Socks and underwear? I’d buy new ones with the money I stole from him. I went to the closet, took a London Fog raincoat he bought when he was drunk in the rain down by Filene’s on payday. I took the pair of white leather cross-trainers that he stole from
me
and then didn’t ever wear. “Sully, more bags,” I called.

“Sully, more bags,” Toy echoed.

“More bags,” Sully sang.

When we’d filled up, we put the bags on the floor outside the room. I felt good, but I wasn’t quite sure yet. “Am I finished?” I asked Toy. He shook his head.

“Sullivan, come here,” Toy said, motioning Sully to the foot of the bed. Toy grabbed the headboard and they lifted, carrying the bed to the other side of the room. Then they moved the bureau to the corner where the bed was. The foot locker they hauled over to beneath the window.

“Yes,” I said, and ran to the living room. I came back with a long cushion from the couch, laying it across the foot locker to make a nice window seat.

“Very Terry,” I said, beaming.

They howled. “Very Terry, very Terry,” we all chanted as we finished redecorating.

“Got any paint?” Sully asked. He froze in the middle of the room, as if he’d shocked even himself.

“Of
course
,” I said, and flew down to the cellar. All I could find were a blue-gray can of Rustoleum spray and a quart of burnt-orange latex with a rock-hard brush my mother used to keep painting over the mold strip around the tub. I threw the Rustoleum to Sully. “You’re up,” I said.

He barely hesitated. Making as large a circle as his reach would allow, he painted a peace sign on the wall opposite the bed, where Terry would be facing it when he woke up. Then he did a butterfly.

“
Very
Terry,” I said, clapping.

Toy was already working. He’d grabbed the burnt-orange away, stood on the dirty clothes-covered chair, and was painting a huge sunrise over, beside, and below the window, with the window itself as the center. It looked like the mural covering the entire back of the supermarket near Toy’s house—where the ponytail christ-guy of exploding colors stretches his arms wide under an orange sun just like that one with spiky triangular rays detached from the ball.

As Toy was finishing the last of the triangle rays, I took the Rustoleum can and made my contribution, to the wall right beside the bed. I was as surprised as anyone when I saw the picture of the goat coming out on the wall. It was primitive, like a cave-wall goat. But it was a goat. The can sputtered as I rushed to get it finished before the paint dried up.

The three of us stood crunched together in the doorway, admiring it. In a weird way, we had made a pretty place out of the room.

“Very Terry.” Sully spat.

“He’ll come home wasted,” I said, “maybe grab a last swallow of Bushmills Old Urine, then try to fall into bed, and break his nose on the floor. He won’t even know where he is.”

“Time, gentlemen,” Toy the dad said.

We each scooped a couple of bags of my new wardrobe and headed out. I was the last.

“Time,” Toy called, from out on the porch now.

“Ya,” I said. But the phone rang. I stared at it. It rang again, rang at me. I put a bag down and grabbed the receiver.

I heard the unmistakable breathing. The whistle through the one clear nostril left from all the nose breakings. The low animal pant. He waited a long time.

“Ma?” he grunted.

I let him hang some more.

“Welcome to the homeless,” I whispered as softly as a person can.

I hung up and walked out, butterflies of satisfaction beating in my belly.

I
HAD BEEN A
t Sully’s for four days, eating, sleeping, going to school, and staring for long hours out my dormer window, before I got a call.

“Yo, ah, Mick,” Mr. Sullivan called from the bottom of the stairs. “Your ma’s on the horn for ya.”

I took my time getting to the phone. I straightened out the curtain over the window I’d been staring out of. I pulled on my sneakers, then changed my mind and decided to go without them. I counted the steps between my room, my suite, my bungalow—my pointed penthouse, there ya go—and the floor below. Thirteen steps. That sounded odd. So I retraced and counted again. Yup, thirteen. I washed my hands in the second-floor bathroom.

I wanted to hear her cry, but I could wait.

“Why are you not home yet, Mick? I mean, a couple of days is fine, but this is enough now. Come on home today, after school.”

I laughed, not to be rude, though not that I minded. “Ma. I mean, thanks for missing me, but no thanks, okay?”

“What’s the problem, Mick? Please just come home, today. All right, I’ll see you later then, right?”

She didn’t want any answers, any explanations. Not really. She just wanted everything put back, straightened up. As if I’d just messed up the living room or something.

“No, Ma, you just don’t get it. I’m not coming back there. I cannot live with that animal anymore.”

“Mick!” Only very rarely did her voice rise to the level of a cough, so I listened. “That ‘animal’ has slaved to put a roof over your ungrateful head—”

“Ma. I’m talking about Terry, not Dad.”