Blood Relations (17 page)

“Shut up and take your shot.”

It didn’t matter what I said. He had his script ready.

“By the way,
great
move, pissing in my Bushmills, Mick. I been waitin’ ta see ya so I could tell ya: That’s just what I woulda done. When I saw that, I knew you was gonna be all right. Hear me?
That’s just what I woulda done
.”

I closed my eyes. “Hit me, asshole. Kill me.”

He laughed. “If I blow on ya, you’ll fall down.”

“So blow me,” I said.

He reached over me, stuck his key in the shiny new lock, and opened the door. Like a doorman, he gestured toward the inside and said, “Comin’ in, Mick?”

“No way,” I muttered. “Came to
kill
your ass. If you don’t kill me first.”

“Ain’t gonna,” he said. “I’m feelin’ magfuckinnanimous tonight. And, I got new hope for ya, boy. I’m givin’ ya time. You’ll be back wit us, I know it. And when you come, I’ll take ya.”

He smiled at me, the sickest snaggle-tooth victory grin.

“Sure you won’t come in?” he asked.

I shook my head dumbly, but as defiantly as I could manage.

Terry went in the house, used the phone, went to the refrigerator, and came out with two beers. I took one. “I’d walk ya home, buddy, but your new landlord keeps promisin’ ta accidentally blow my brains out if I’m near his house in the dark. Y’understand.”

When the cab came, Terry put me in it. He gave the driver the Sullivans’ address and he paid him with his own money. Then he leaned in and gave me a filthy, stinko kiss on the forehead.

“See, ain’t I nice?” he asked before telling the driver to take off.

I
HAD JUST
a little bit of a dream, of being in the woods with the Scouts, me and Sully, and Baba was there even, back when people still called him Ryan because he wasn’t yet teenage wasteland, and he was eating the legs off a live frog he caught with a long homemade frog sticker. Campfire was burning, crackling loud and broken up with the occasional little explosion of a pinecone. There was no other sound at all, and it was soothing, warming my whole front until I turned myself around and warmed my whole back, and that strange forceful fire sound making me feel bigger inside. We stood around, kids all of us, just kids, smiling at the fire and leaning too close so that our already red faces got cracky with the dry heat, which was okay enough. Even Baba, who was still Ryan.

And there wasn’t another sound but that fire sound, no dopey guitar or camping songs, no fart contests, no big hog-little hog jokes. Fire sound alone.

Until the blast of a whooshing tornado noise ripped through it.

I jumped up in bed, stood there on my knees, watching Mr. Sullivan working the small kitchen fire extinguisher. The last of the yellow flame lapped up the wall behind the hot plate before finally it was all squirted out.

I knew that I had done something horrible, that I had left the stupid soup on all night and had set a fire in the place where they took me in.

Mr. Sullivan threw the extinguisher down on the floor with a crash, then stood staring at me with his hands on his hips. He didn’t talk right off, just stood, and stared, melting me hotter and quicker than if he’d let the flame get me.

“Should have let the flame get you,” he growled. “You’re lucky I have a nose like a damn dog.”

He looked massive, much bigger than ever before, his mustache bushier and whiter over his fire-reddened face. I shook, could see myself shaking, as I waited for the beating.

It was five minutes. He stared at me. I shook and I shook. I tried to stop it, to get hold of myself, but it got worse, more noticeable until the whole bed was trembling in the corners of my eyes. I was petrified to turn away, so he just burned that stare into me. He looked like a thing carved out of stone. His big chest didn’t move with breathing, his eyes didn’t water, his obscene pointed Adam’s apple didn’t hitch once. It was a beating, what he did to me with his presence.

Then he was done. “You want to ask me if I’m surprised?” he asked coldly.

“I don’t, Mr. Sullivan.”

“I’m afraid you’re just genetically wired to be a waste, Mick. I suppose it ain’t your fault, but...” He walked out banging two giant fists together hard, leaving me with the mess, the smoke, and the chemical stench of the snuffed fire, and with myself.

I fell right over on my nose as soon as he was gone, toppled right off the side of the bed and didn’t have the strength to raise my hands to shield my face. I lay there flat-faced for a second, thought about it all, then banged my forehead on the floor on purpose. I did it again. I did it again and again and again and again.

Then I packed my stuff, as much as I could get into one bag, and slithered out. No one else in the house was up yet. I didn’t know where Mr. Sullivan was, which made me run all the way down the stairs and out the door.

I stopped running when I was a block away. On my way to where? I was still chewing crumbs of cork and gummy soup as I thought about my whereabouts. Nowhere. Where was my home? On my back, like a hermit crab. In the pack with a few pairs of Terry’s pants and the last of the stolen money, also from Terry. I had stopped running, but still walked briskly. No reason for that. I stopped, sat on the curb.

“I ain’t genetically wired for nothin’,” I said. I winced when I recalled having a beer with Terry the night before. “Bullshit, bullshit. I don’t have nothing to do with them, they have nothing to do with me...” I opened the pack and started pulling the clothes out, flinging pants here, shirts there, all over the deserted street. Then the money. Terry’s one-dollar bills, crumpled into wads like baseballs, thrown as far as I could. I tipped the bag upside down, laughed hard as the last of everything fell to the ground and I threw the bag too.

“I’m free, I’m clean. I’m the freest guy in the goddamn world.” I sat on the curb to watch the bills blow around. “Everybody wishes they were me now. The free guy, they’ll call me.” I put my elbows on my knees, there on the curb, and my face in my hands.

There wasn’t much wind. Only one car went by. The money really didn’t blow. The clothes certainly didn’t go anywhere. It was all still there in front of me when I lifted my face out of the little puddle I’d made in my palms.

I went into the street and picked up my bag. I moved around like a pathetic little old man as I collected everything back up again.

Standing outside Toy’s house later that Sunday morning, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I had used up every other option. Maybe this time he’d take me on a permanent road trip far, far away from here.

I didn’t want to ring the bell, so I threw pebbles. Four throws, two hits, no answer. Three more hits, no answer. One big clank, thought I cracked the window, thought about running.

Felina appeared in the window. Of course I hit the wrong window. I started backing away, mouthing, “Sorry, sorry,” and bowing like a servant as I did.

She didn’t respond in any way. She just kept staring, expressionless. First I thought she was angry, but then I didn’t think so. I stopped backing off. I stared back. I supposed I was quite a sight by then, but it couldn’t have been all that interesting to her. She had me locked with her eyes. She held up a hand for me to wait.

I met her at the door. She was wearing red cutoff sweatpants and a thin white muscle T-shirt with straps instead of sleeves.

“Toy’s not here,” she said.

“Oh. Road trip, right?” I said, trying, and failing, not to stare at her. A small morning breeze blew by, and she folded her arms.

“Carlo’s not here, either,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have woken you up. This is really stupid of me. I don’t know what I’m doing lately.”

“You’re limping again. Like last time.”

I had to smile, because that felt good—the connection to before, the idea that she noticed something about me. I looked down at my legs, bounced on them, leaning on the left, then the right. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“The psychic limp, I mean. You always come dragging into this port.”

“Ya,” I said, holding the dopey smile. “I seem to, huh? Well, you did tell me, that other time, that I should come back again.”

Finally, she smiled a different kind of smile. Not an “I know things” smile that made me blush and that made me feel sad for her, but a “this is nice” smile. “Then it’s an invitation you’re responding to here, in the wee hours of a Sunday morning. I see.” She paused long enough for me to get nervous. “So I should let you in then.”

“No,” I snapped, for no other reason than that was the very last thing I
wanted
to say and that’s the way my brain was working. My brain, my whole body, was so overloaded at that moment, fizzing and zapping like a radio dropped into a bathtub full of water.

Felina stepped back, looking deeply embarrassed. She looked at the floor, looked behind her. “I’m sorry, you’re right, I’m sorry. It’s just... anyway, it’s not your problem.”

Her sudden frailty, that retreat into a sad and naked neediness, surprised me. I loved finding it, like I’d met an old friend. It made me feel somehow like I had a right to be here.

“What I meant was yes,” I rushed, before she could regroup.

She smiled broadly, still looking down a bit to hide it.

“You sure this isn’t a mistake?” I asked cautiously, giving her a fair chance to wake up.

“Oh, I’m certain that it is,” she said. “But you know there are rules. Like in the Dracula movies where Dracula can’t come in your house unless you invite him in. I know the rules, I know the risks, so it’s my own fault what happens to me, isn’t it?” Her voice had regained the snap and confidence, which didn’t intimidate me so much, now that I had heard the other.

“Right, Dracula?” she asked as she took my hand and led me inside.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Blue-Eyed Son Trilogy

M
Y LIFE HAD COME
to seem to me like a combination deal. As if I were at the beach and there was a wicked undertow
and
I didn’t know how to swim, so I couldn’t get out of the damn water to save my life. My sadistic brother, Terry; my neighborhood; my parents—my parents owning a bar was like Jack and Mrs. Ripper running a cutlery shop. These were the undertow, the factors I could not alter, that would hold me down forever if I didn’t break loose.

But the no swimming part, that was me. That was nobody’s fault but mine. I finally got a date with Evelyn of my dreams and I showed up wasted. Who was to blame there? Sully, who turned out to be more reliable, more loyal than I ever realized, who turned out to be more friend than I deserved, Sully and his family took me in when I couldn’t go home again. I said thank you by setting their house on fire. Who would I blame for that? Terry had gotten me so twisted up with hate that I began acting just as disgusting and ignorant as he did in an effort to prove I was better than he was. More than once already I’d flashed on the thought that I could kill him, without regret, if that would settle everything for good.

And Toy, who was there so many times when I needed him. Toy, to whom I was running one more time for a solution. What did I do for my friend Toy?

She was his mother, for chrissake. Why couldn’t I hold that thought when I needed to? What is the matter with a person who acts the way I do? And is it curable?

These were the thoughts that swirled through my head as I lay where I did not belong. But they all instantly shrank away next to the size of my new problem. My own father was medium big, and Sully’s father was scary big, but when my eyes opened and Toy’s father, Carlo, was standing beside me casting a shadow over me and Felina and the nightstand, my fibrous little body went rigid as an ice pop. That’s what I must have looked like to him too as he whipped back the covers to expose us naked on his bed. Felina was cool, waking up gradually, stretching and purring, coiling back up again all curve and caramel on the white sheet. I was her opposite, petrified, laid out straight as a number 1.

He was a hairy mountain of a guy, with a black beard and a black leather cap, and when he spoke it made the bed vibrate.

“Who we got here, Lina?” He didn’t sound all that concerned about it.

“Company, Carlo.” Neither did she.

As I lay there waiting on my fate, the two of them chatting across my body, I found out something about myself. When I get totally, out-of-my-mind terrified, I get a furious erection. Right there, like a centerpiece, it sprouted into the middle of the conversation. Which probably didn’t help anything.

Carlo grabbed me by the hair. Again not angrily, but with a growly sense of determination.

As I was leaving the bed, I did not know what was going to become of me. But for one instant, it didn’t matter. I reached out my hand on the way by, lightly placed it flat on the smooth, buttery skin of Felina’s belly, and let my fingertips ski across her, as he pulled me away. Just to save it, to keep it all for a bit.

“Say good-bye to company, Lina,” Carlo said as he hauled me out. She waved.

Carlo yanked pretty good as he towed me along. It hurt, and I was scared, but I was grateful. Whatever he did to me, I was still glad it was the husband, and not the son, who found me.