Blood Relations (8 page)

Oh yes I did. I was there last year and the year before and the year before, back to when I reached the local official drinking age of twelve. I liked it then, drunk off my ass and puking up more guts than I ever thought I had just because Southern Comfort tasted a little too much like berries. And I didn’t even mind it too much last year when I got clocked by that big stupid college rent-a-cop, because, well, I did hit him first and I was holding the spray paint can and I did after all get the big laughs I was after when I painted him to begin with.

But not now. As I listened to Terry and Augie and Bunky and Bobo yuck it up just a few feet away doing what they’d done before, only now they sounded like I didn’t even know them even though I knew them too damn well, I had but one thought. And that was to run. This was not a good place for me, and it would get worse quickly.

I needed a shower. I didn’t take one. I pulled on yesterday’s dirty baggies, buttoned my shirt up to my neck, watched my hands shake as I pulled on my socks and shoes. I threw on my Ruben Cruz fedora and stepped lively out toward the front door.

“Hey,” Terry ordered. “Get your sneaky little ass down here.”

I stood with my hand on the knob, thinking about just going.

“Don’t
make
us send Bobo after you,” Augie laughed.

Bobo is a shiny brown, square, mean and stupid Rottweiler-Great Dane mix, almost as tall as me. He looks like a UPS truck, and is legend for throwing himself on whatever Augie tells him to, even a moving police car once.

I turned and walked back to the living room.

“Where are you goin’?” Terry asked. “Din’ you hear me jus’ tell you it was May Day?”

“Yo, Mickey-boy,” Augie said from way down in my father’s soft, shredded armchair, “you wanna see what Bobo can do?”

“No.”

Terry bellowed. “No? No, you didn’t hear me tell you it was May Day? What are you, goddamn deaf or goddamn stupid? Augie, you hear me tell him, like, pretty goddamn loud?”

“Heard ya, bro. Personally, I think he’s goddamn stupid, not goddamn deaf.”

“No. I didn’t say no I didn’t hear you, Terry. I said no I didn’t want to see Bobo’s stupid trick.”

“Here, watch,” Augie said anyway. He reached over to the end table beside him, took a bottle cap and dunked it into a bowl of onion dip, covering two fingers and a thumb up to the knuckle. “Bo. Yo, Bo,” he said, and flipped the dog the coated metal cap. Bobo snapped it out of the air and chewed on it, crunching and grinding until he’d pulverized it, then swallowing. When he finished, he scooted up closer and sat in begging position in front of Augie. Augie tossed him another cap, without dip, and the dog did the same thing again.

By now, Terry had walked right up to me. He smelled bitter like vomit even though it was still a little early for that. “So like I said, where are ya goin’?”

“I’m going out,” I said.

It was as if he had prepared this, had been waiting for it. “Ya ain’t supposed ta be goin’ nowhere, ya supposed ta be wid us. Ya wid us, Mick?” He spoke low, which was not his way, and with a smile, which was not his way. Slowly, he reached up and unbuttoned the top button of my shirt. “We don’t do that,” he said. “Ya made a mistake, when you was dressin’ so fast.”

Then he reached down and started tucking the front of my shirt into my pants, never taking his eyes from my eyes. “Yer just such a mess taday, boyo. Ya don’t know which end is up, do ya?”

I didn’t look away either. I stared right into him as I slowly raised my hands and started buttoning my top button again. “I like it this way. No mistake.”

“Mistake,”
he snarled, and as he tucked, jammed his fist down into my pants. I froze.

“Now ya wanna see what Bunky can do?” Augie chirped. “It’s even better, ’cause he’s a lot smarter than Bobo. He’s the brains, Bobo’s the brawn.”

“Get it out,” I said to Terry.

“In a minute I will. When I’m ready.” He reached up with his free hand and snatched the hat off my head. With his knuckles still jammed against my balls, he tossed the hat into the middle of the floor. “Get it, Bobo,” he said, and when after a few seconds Augie repeated the order, Bobo set himself on the hat. He pressed it to the floor with his big paws and with his mouth tore at the felt like it was wet paper. First he made about a dozen jerky strips, then swallowed each one.

Terry yanked his hand out of my pants, stepping back and smirking. “I had ya. I let ya go. I can have ya again, anytime I want. Remember.”

I gave him no reaction, except to untuck my shirt again.

“So, pull up ya chair, boy,” Augie said, uncapping a Ballantine short-neck bottle and aiming it at me.

“No,” I said.

“Why no?” Augie was genuinely puzzled.

“Because I don’t want it,” I said.

He stared at me, head tilted to one side. “Your hair’s gettin’ pretty damn long there, kid.”

“I know it is.” I was starting to feel it, starting to feel the closing in all around. I started to sweat.

“I ain’t seen him take so much as a sip lately, Augie,” Terry said, snatching the bottle from him. He brought it to me, stuck it under my nose. “Lost the taste, have ya, Mick?”

It was then I realized that I hadn’t. The carbon bubbles were popping, tickling, carrying the strong yeasty Ballantine head up into my nostrils. My mouth watered, but my stomach clenched.

“You need a haircut, freak,” Augie said.

I pushed the bottle away from my face. “You’re right,” I said, pointing at Augie. “I do. And I’m gonna get one, right now.” I quickly started backing way, back toward the front door.

“So have a goddamn blast before ya go,” Terry said, following me halfway to the door with the bottle. “Get back here and drink the damn thing.” His voice rose. “It ain’t like the goddamn barber shop is goin’ any goddamn place.”

“I don’t
want
it,” I said.

He was infuriated now. He ran to catch me at the door, but I ran faster to get away. He screamed at me from the porch. “What are you,
good
? You
good
now or somethin’, Mick?” And he heaved the full bottle at me, missing me by a mile as it shattered and splattered on the curb.

Sully loves me. What is she talking about, Sully loves me? What a mental thing to say. A lot that’ll get me anyhow, Sully’s love. That’ll get me far.

Whether I believed it or not, that’s where I found myself when I escaped, Sully’s house. I stood there on the sidewalk looking up at his bedroom window, in the house that looked just like my house. Like I’d done a hundred thousand times before when I was just looking for someplace to go to that wasn’t my place, that didn’t have my parents or my brother inside. The difference though was that this time I didn’t have two fingers in my mouth whistling myself blue for him to come down and claim me. This time I looked, stared up there like a freak on the sidewalk, and went on my way. If he had just happened to come to the window that would have been okay, I could maybe have stayed there for the weekend till May Day blew over, if he invited me. But he didn’t, and I couldn’t call or whistle for him this time. It just didn’t feel like I could do that now.

I walked on, no destination, just on. I thought about it, where I wasn’t going, and felt a small scared shiver. It was the same nothing for me in both directions, forward and back. I had no home. My parents had cleared out, surrendered the place to the barbarians. Never even mentioned it to me, that they wouldn’t be around for a couple of days. And even though this was a regular thing for May Day and even though we all know they are going, is that right, that they shouldn’t say something to me? It’s like, the
home
, it isn’t
there
for me.

But it was never important before, so it wasn’t important now. There were other places for me, even if they were few.

“Hey freakin’ ho,
muchacho
, ain’t this a damn treat,” Ruben said as he pulled back the curtain from the small front door window. I listened as he unlocked three dead bolts, then threw the door wide open. “This may surprise you, but I don’t get a whole lotta visitors, specially on no Saturday morning.”

It was such a happy, welcoming thing, Ruben’s broad gap-toothed smile, that it almost made me feel right. It almost made nothing else matter. “You want some breakfast?” he said. “I think I got a egg and a little skinny-ass frozen sausage.”

But I had to tell him the truth. “Thanks, man, that’s really nice. But actually, I’m here to see Evelyn. Is she home?”

Slam. Bolt, bolt, bolt. Ruben was gone from view and the door was again well secured. I sighed, rang the bell again.

“Who is it?” Ruben’s voice sang from the other side of the door.

“Come on, Cruz, it’s me.”

His small fine face appeared in the window again. “Jehovah’s Witness?” he asked.

“No. I’m here to see Evelyn.”

“Evelyn?”

“Your sister. Cut the shit.”

“Sorry, I ain’t got no sister Evelyn. You mean Juana?”

“Fine. I mean Juana.”

“I ain’t got no sister Juana. Listen you, you better get outta here or I’m gonna put the dog on you. I mean it.”

I turned and walked down the stairs as Ruben went into an inspired fit of snarling and yowling and hurling himself against the door. I hopped the fence, passed the Mary and flamingo statues, and snuck around to the back door, hoping Evelyn could possibly hear the knock before her brother White Fang cut it off. But just as I turned the corner in back, I was blasted backward by a growl so low and nasty I didn’t hear it, I felt it under my feet.

A dog. They had a dog, a real dog, a massive black dog on a chain with a spiked collar, a dog too mean even to bark for fear that victims wouldn’t get close enough for mangling. He curled one lip at me as he growled, a red pulpy piece of something hanging off a lower front tooth while the rest of the pulpy red something—maybe it was a rabbit or a cat or a smaller dog—lay a few feet away at the entrance to its tar-papered dog shed.

I backed out of the yard, watching the beast, my whole body shaking.

“Whatchu think, I be
lyin’
’bout my dog?” Cruz laughed from the porch as I passed. “I don’t know what you was thinkin’ that you could jus’ come on over here an’ y’know, have your way an’ shit...”

I walked away as quickly as I could, with my legs still rubbery from the dog scare. I didn’t even look at Ruben.

“Hey, where you goin? I thought we was gonna do somethin?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hey, I’m
talkin’
to you!” he yelled, trying to sound tough. In the next breath, though, he sounded like a little boy. “Where’s the hat I gave you...? Hey... I was just playin’...”

I couldn’t play. Maybe later I could play but not now. I had, had, I
had
to have someplace I could go. I wasn’t sure if there was such a place for me, but I did know there was a place that took in everybody.

I didn’t feel so foreign this time, as I cruised the skanky streets on the east side of the school, past the neighborhoods that belonged to somebody else, down down deeper toward the bay, to that mongrel patchwork of a subcity for nowhere people. I felt kind of right when I got down to the fish-packing plants and slanty apartment houses of Toy’s world.

“Is he here?” I asked hopefully, tentatively, though I somehow already knew that he wasn’t.

“What are you talking about?” Felina asked wearily, sagging against the door frame. “It’s the weekend. He isn’t here on the weekend. This is the ghost house once Friday comes.”

“I’m sorry...” I said, already wishing I hadn’t come.

Everything was making me weak, draining me of life. Terry and Augie and Bunky and Bobo and Ballantine at nine. Sully-who-loves-me’s house. Ruben’s nightmare dog. Felina and her tired voice and her big black hollow eyes. I felt as sapped as Felina looked.

“Do you like coffee?” she asked, like the recorded time and temperature voice on the phone.

“I like coffee.”

“Would you like some, coffee?”

“I would like some. Coffee.”

I went in there, and up, up the stairs behind Felina. Into the house at the end of the world. I followed her, like I figured I was supposed to, not talking, as we passed through the living room where I met her that first time. But I didn’t want to think about that. I followed her down a hallway so narrow that the knuckles of both of my hands brushed the walls as I walked. With a three-foot lead, Felina reached into doorways and yanked each door shut, two on the right, one on the left, before I could see in. “Wasn’t expecting company,” she said. “You understand.”

In the kitchen, she pointed to a chair. I sat in it, an orange vinyl-covered swiveler on big ball casters. Three more like it surrounded the circular brown Formica table. The room felt small, maybe because of the grapefruit-size roses on the grease-bubbled wallpaper that seemed to be closing in from every direction.

“So,” she said, stirring coffee in a saucepan on the stove top. “Why are you here?”

I hadn’t expected that. What had I expected?

“Toy, right?” I said weakly. “I’m lookin’ for Toy, remember?”

“Oh,” she said, and kept on stirring. “It’s just that, you weren’t here last Saturday. Or the Saturday before. Or any of the other Saturdays. And the only other time I ever saw you, you seemed a little banged up and freaky.”

I thought of three different things to say, none of which really answered her. “Should I go?” is what finally came out.

“Oh, but there was that other time,” she said, walking toward me with the hot pan in her hand. She smiled shyly, slyly. “You did come here that one other time, didn’t you?”

I swiveled side to side to side to side in my chair. Couldn’t get that image out of my head now, of the first time I saw her, on the couch with her big old hairy husband and that other woman. Couldn’t get the image out. She’d planted it back in my head just like that and I couldn’t get it to stop playing over and over again. Didn’t totally want to get it out, to tell the truth. Her back. Her long, smooth, S-curved red-brown back. If she wasn’t here, in front of me, I could love that. But it was making me squirm now.

She pulled down two mismatched mugs from a tree in the middle of the table, held the pan high, and poured. She didn’t comment on my long squiggly silence. Then she let me off the line. “But anyway, most of the time, is my point, most of the time you seem to show here when you’re sort of limping. You limping now?”