Dead Boys (12 page)

“Ho ho ho,” he bellows. We deviate from the list whenever we feel like it, grabbing potato chips, ice cream, caramel corn, and cookies.

“You sure it’s okay?” Karl asks as he reaches for a box of graham crackers.

“Come on, man, it’s Christmas,” I reply.

He tries to give me money at the checkout counter, but I wave it off. While the clerk is ringing us up, I turn to the candy rack and casually slip five Hershey bars into my jacket pocket. It’s a silly habit that took hold a few months ago. Every time I pay for something, I look for something to steal. An odd compulsion to develop at my age, I know, but I kind of enjoy it. It worries and disgusts me and gives me a thrill all at the same time.

We walk over to examine the trees for sale in the parking lot after putting the bags in the car. The night has grown colder, and neither of us is really dressed for it. Karl raises his hands to his mouth and blows on them, and they disappear in the fog his breath makes. Colored lights hang above the sad forest of misshapen pines and scrawny firs, and the bulbs are reflected in the drops of water clinging to the needles of the freshly misted branches. A Mexican kid in a stocking cap follows us as we search for the least lopsided of the bunch.

Actually, I’m not all that particular. It’s Karl who seems to have some idea of what he wants. “How’s this?” I ask once or twice, but he shakes his head and moves on. After two circuits of the place, I’ve had enough. I stroll to the flocking tent, where a fire burns inside an oil drum. Standing over it, I let the flames lick my palms, then press them to my face and cup my icy ears. A few minutes later Karl joins me, and the kid.

“What a bunch of garbage,” Karl says. “Looks like they kept the best for themselves.” He points with his chin into the tent, indicating a five-foot tree caked with fake snow and swaddled in lights and blue glass ornaments. A golden angel is perched on top, a trumpet raised to its lips. It’s a nightmare. Really. Judy will fucking die.

“How much for that?” I ask the kid.

“It’s not for sale. It’s like the display.”

“Lights, decorations, everything, how much?”

The kid shrugs and goes off to consult the owner.

“Forget it, bro,” Karl says. “They’re gonna rip you off.”

I put my finger to my lips to shush him.

The kid returns and says, “Two hundred.”

Karl snorts. “Yeah, right. Let’s go.”

“We’ll take it,” I tell the kid.

“What’s up with you?” Karl asks, a shocked look on his face.

“Ho ho ho,” I reply.

I’m for tying the thing to the roof of the car, angel and all, but Karl insists upon removing the ornaments first. The kid finds an empty cardboard box, and I watch from the oil drum as the two of them gently stack the balls inside it.

“I
SAW WHAT
you did in the store,” Karl says on the drive home.

“So,” I reply.

“What’s the point?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Well, I was stupid and drunk and on drugs.”

I feel myself blushing and hope he doesn’t notice. He does, though, I can tell by his smile when I glance over at him. “It’s just a game I play with myself,” I say.

“You ever see a shrink?”

“Should I?”

“It helped me.”

“Are you sure?”

If he answers that, I’m ready with more, but he doesn’t. He turns away from me and stares out the window at a little house with bars on its windows and a plastic Nativity scene in the yard. You don’t get a silence like this every day. I’d like to tear off a piece of it and keep it in my wallet for later.

I
MADE A
run for it once. It was before Judy and I were married, but we’d been living together for about a year, and I could see where things were headed. I was editing the employee newsletter for an aerospace firm at the time. Corporate propaganda interspersed with health tips, recipes, and announcements of promotions, anniversaries, and retirements. Every issue I’d set up the headlines so that the first letters of each of them read in sequence would spell out messages like FUCK THIS PLACE and KILL YOURSELF NOW. I waited to get caught, but never did.

It was a Monday afternoon in March, a day so bright and clear that the mountains looked close enough to walk to. I left work for lunch but kept driving right past Taco Bell to the freeway. West was the ocean and the end of everything, so I headed east, into the desert. Gradually the malls and gas stations fell away, the houses, the people. I found myself alone in a pitiless wasteland. It was lunar, perfect. The craggy hills in the distance stood firm against the sun and wind, but everything near me was well on its way to being worn down to dust. Here and there wiry plants clutched at the rocky ground for dear life.

I stopped the car and walked a few hundred feet off the road to a boulder that broke the flatness of the plain. I took off my clothes. The boulder was warm against my skin, almost silky, as I lay on top of it. A shy little lizard poked its head out of a crack, and a pair of hawks circled overhead. I held my breath, then exhaled slowly, and Whatever was bent almost to breaking inside me seemed to straighten itself out.

The wind picked up toward sundown, surprisingly cold. I drove on across the border into Nevada and stopped in a little town that wasn’t much more than a gas station, a motel, and a casino. “Car trouble?” the woman asked when she handed me the keys to my room, as if that was the only reason anybody would end up there. I could have kissed her.

Feeling reckless and lucky, I walked over to the casino. It was deserted except for a couple of snowbirds playing video poker. The bartender was a fat man with a handlebar mustache. When he asked me where I was from, I said, “tonight? Right here,” which got me a dirty look.

The blackjack and craps tables were dark, so I spent a few hours drinking and throwing money at the slots. What happened next has always been somewhat hazy — this was back in my hard liquor years. I hit a jackpot, fifty or sixty dollars, and tried to give it to the cocktail waitress. She wouldn’t take it, and that pissed me off. I got on the bartender’s bad side, too. My jokes went right over his head. “You must know where the whores are in this town,” I said, and he asked me to leave.

There was blood on my pillow when I came to in the morning. My lip was busted, my left eye swollen almost shut. I vomited all the way back to L.A., pulling over to the side of the road every twenty miles or so. What can I say but that I failed? I had a spark within me, but not enough fuel to break the bonds of gravity.

I
WAKE UP
at five a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. When it’s quiet like this, before the city revs up, you hear the strangest sounds. Roosters crowing, squirrels in the trees, distant trains. Nobody believes me, but it’s true. I roll over to put my arms around Judy. She shudders and pulls away, scooting to the edge of the bed.

The refrigerator is full of food. I’m not used to this. It takes me a while to notice the blood. The plastic the turkey is sealed in has a hole in it, and watery pink blood has leaked out and puddled on the bottom shelf. I take out all the beer and sodas and pickles and sour cream and clean everything off in the sink.

As the sun comes up on the morning of Christmas Eve day, I’m sitting at the kitchen table, eating the chocolate chip cookies we bought last night and drinking a glass of milk. Karl is asleep on the couch in the living room. I hear him breathing. I sense he doesn’t like me much. He thinks I’m weak and bizarre, and he’s right, but how do I make him understand that everyone here is weak and bizarre?

I
T’S JUDY’S IDEA
to drive to the beach. She suggests it after breakfast. Karl is washing the dishes, and I’m drying.

“We’ll go out there and laugh at the rest of the country,” she says. “Picture them shoveling snow.”

“That’d be something,” Karl replies.

Good. It’ll be good to get out of the apartment, all of us together. My wife is a genius. I rustle up a pair of shorts for Karl. We throw the snacks he and I bought into a bag, then some towels, a blanket, and we’re off.

What a day. The sky is a flawless blue, the sun a cheerful old friend. We take Judy’s car. She drives, Karl sits in back, and the radio plays all my favorite songs. I start up the license plate game. We alternate calling out the letters of the alphabet as we spot them on passing cars. Karl joins right in. “What am I?” he asks, and we switch to twenty questions.

The freeway dumps us out at the beach, which is almost empty at this time of the year. It’s a little colder than it was in Silver Lake, a little windier, but we tromp out and spread our blanket on the sand like it was the Fourth of July. Karl strips off his shirt, revealing a large tattoo on his chest. BROKEN-HEARTED, it reads, the letters arching over the face of a woman. “Momma,” he says before Judy or I have a chance to ask. “Prison shit.”

The waves are sluggish today, syrupy, breaking with only the greatest of effort. Propped on my elbows, I watch them struggle toward shore, while Judy, sitting beside me, flips through the pages of a magazine. I find that if I lie perfectly still, the sun eventually wins out over the breeze and provides a fragile warmth.

The high tide line is marked by a band of waterlogged debris, kelp mostly, driftwood, odd chunks of Styrofoam and plastic. Karl strolls along beside it, stirring up a cloud of flies every time he stops to poke around in the mess with a stick he found somewhere. In the distance, the pier stands black and skeletal against the sky, its burden of joyless fishermen and stoned teenagers placing entirely too much faith in the strength of its spindly pilings, or perhaps the possibility of collapse is all part of the fun.

“What are you thinking about?” Judy asks, her cold hand on my shoulder.

“Nothing.”

“Is your brother enjoying himself? Seems like it.”

“I’m doing my best.”

She reaches down to scratch her ankle. “That tree you guys got is something else.”

“I knew you’d like it.”

“We’re awful, aren’t we?”

The conversation has upset my delicate relationship with the sun. I sit up and hug myself for a quick fix of warmth. “We should have brought beer,” I say. “Or tequila. Tequila would have been great.”

Karl approaches the blanket, carrying something on the end of his stick.

“Check it out, a jellyfish,” he yells.

“That’s close enough. Those things can sting even when they’re dead,” I caution.

“Yeah, keep it away from here,” Judy chimes in.

Karl stops short, disappointed by our reaction. He examines the jellyfish up close once more, then drops it into a hole he kicks into the sand and buries it with his foot.

“I’m going swimming. Come on, bro,” he says.

Judy throws down her magazine. “I’m ready.”

“There’s shit in that water,” I scoff. “Big poisonous turds.”

They laugh at me before running down to the waves together. Judy advances slowly on stiffened legs and screams as the frigid water swirls around her calves, but Karl enters at a run and dives headfirst into the breakers. By the time she’s in up to her waist, he’s already bobbing in the swells, not touching bottom.

I turn away from them, from the sea, and lie on my stomach. In the parking lot two young lovers wrapped in one jacket lean against the hood of a car. The girl rests her head on the boy’s chest, and he strokes her hair. A thing like that isn’t supposed to make you angry, I know.

A C
HRISTMAS STORY
? I’ve got one. I was sixteen, thumbing my way out of trouble somewhere down in Louisiana, I believe, and this old boy picked me up on Christmas Eve. He asked was I hungry, and I was, so he told me there was a birthday cake in the backseat I was welcome to. He worked in a bakery, see, and got to take home the leftovers and mistakes. It was chocolate with white frosting and big blue flowers, and I dug right in with my fingers and ate it all up while the dude laughed and laughed. Afterward he sparked up a bomber, and I was like, well, here we are, man, here we are.

A few miles down the road he started in. “You like cock? You sure look like you would.” Ain’t nothing come for free, right? I don’t know what I was thinking. You gotta figure a guy must be packing if he’s talking like that, so plain to a stranger, and I’m not gonna lie but I was scared. I told him I had to piss, and he asked could he watch. “Sure,” I said. “Enjoy the show.” As soon as the car pulled over, I was out the door and up the hill into the woods as fast as I could get. I found a good hiding place and hunkered down where I could see him through the trees. He fired a few rounds from a little pistol up my way, then got back in his car and left.

After an hour or so I started walking. Didn’t even bother to stick my thumb out. It was so bitter cold and kind of sleety, and in the middle of the night with me looking such a mess, nobody was gonna stop. Up the road a ways I came upon a blanket I thought I could maybe use, but when I went to snatch it up, there was something wrapped inside it. A dog, I thought, or, I don’t know why, a monkey, but it was a baby, a little blue baby. It seemed dead till it started to cry. I can’t say I didn’t think about just moving on down the line, but it was a baby, man. A baby. On Christmas Eve.

I shoved it up under my shirt and jacket, and it was like carrying a block of ice. I could feel its heart beating right next to mine. Cars were passing all the while, and I waved like crazy, but they went right on by. First time I ever prayed to see a cop, I can tell you that. After a few miles of walking, the little guy warmed up a bit, and you know what he did? He went right for my tit, like I was his momma. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so hopeless, but my tears froze before they made it halfway down my face.

Finally I saw a house all lit up for the holidays. I banged on the door, and they let me in, real nice black folks, just sitting down to dinner. The lady of the family took the baby from me and set about making it comfortable till the ambulance could get there. They fixed me up with a plate, and their children sang Sunday school songs for me. The sheriff gave me an empty cell to sleep in that night and had me over to his house the next day. There was a present for me under the tree and everything, a new coat. It wasn’t until he put me on the bus to New Orleans after dinner that he told me the baby had died.