Dead Boys (15 page)
I leaned the picture against my pillow and crouched at the foot of the bed. The pistol sighed sharply each time I squeezed the trigger. I blew both our heads off, then shot the beach up just for the hell of it. When I flipped the picture over, the scattering of raised perforations left by the pellets reminded me of braille. I closed my eyes and ran my fingertips across them. When the money ran out, Cathy did, too. There should have been signs. I should have seen them.
I turned out the light, and the darkness tightened around me, sticky as a spider’s web. Lying in bed, I drew circles in the air with the cherry of my cigarette while every sound I’d ever heard in my life poured through the open window at once. I chose a single thread of the clamorous snarl to concentrate on; the plashy roar of the ocean, it might have been, or teardrops striking asphalt, amplified a thousand times. My rude lullaby.
W
E WERE ON
our way in one morning when the strikers broke through the police cordon and began rocking the bus. Glass shattered and a woman screamed. I lifted my face off my knees to watch somebody crawl up the aisle, an Indian named Subhash. He pressed a hand to the side of his head, blood and hair between his fingers.
“They have killed me,” he wailed.
He rose to his knees as the driver gunned the engine to make a run for the gate. The sudden lurch slammed him onto his back, and he lay there silent and still. The driver ordered us not to move him, which meant that some of us had to step over his body to disembark.
Word went around later that he was fine — his cut had been fixed with a Band-Aid — but that he’d been so frightened he’d wet his pants. Curtis, whose terminal was next to mine, couldn’t stop talking about it. He felt sure Subhash would sue for stress and humiliation and wind up collecting a million dollars.
“Motherfucker gets a million for pissing,” he said. “I’m gonna shit myself tomorrow, see if I can get two.”
Someone else heard Subhash had died, but that the company was keeping it secret. You’d be surprised how many people wanted to believe that one.
I
T WASN’T UNTIL
Saturday, when Emma shopped garage sales after church, that I could hunt in earnest. The crushed soda crackers I spread over a bare patch in the yard drew a whole flock of small brown birds, any of which might have been the one I was after. This was an unexpected complication, but I didn’t let it discourage me. A picnic table and an old canvas tarp served as a blind. I had no trouble dropping a bird with my first shot. The others leaped into the air and disappeared when it fell.
The bird lay on its back, not quite dead yet, and I walked out to examine it. Its scaly little claws made me nauseous, the way they jerked and clutched as if trying to tear something apart. I rolled it over with the barrel of the pistol, and the blood welling up in its open beak was like a shiny red berry.
Suddenly it began to thrash about, its spastic wings beating the dirt into dust, and I ran to the porch and stood there shaking, my hand on the doorknob, ready to flee if the bird came at me. It quieted down quickly enough, though, and I finally worked up the nerve to approach it again and fire three more times, putting the last pellet right into its hateful black eye.
I waited for punishment then — the bird had suffered, after all — but the sun glowed just as brightly, and the ground stayed firm beneath my feet, and I knew the disappointment some criminals must feel when their most daring transgressions fail to make the papers.
I used a shovel I found leaning against the house to scoop the bird up and toss it over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, and the others returned and settled onto the saltines before I’d even concealed myself again. Their greed disgusted me. There was no need to take aim, and I didn’t bother to remove the bodies of those I killed after that. The flock dispersed each time one of their number went down, but reassembled out of nowhere seconds later, like something snapping suddenly into focus. They ignored the dead completely, bouncing merrily over the corpses.
I fired until the pistol was empty, which was a mistake, because some of the birds were still alive when I finally went out with the shovel to gather them up. I couldn’t bring myself to wring their necks, so the wounded ended up with the dead in a hole I dug at the back of the yard.
The telephone bird rang louder than ever from a lemon tree as I smoothed topsoil over the grave, and I sat down and cried for a while, brokenhearted because I’d saddled myself with another secret, this butchery.
S
ANDAL SHOUTED ME
out of a beautiful dream in which my wife and I were planning a ski trip, and the water-stained ceiling of my room was almost too much to bear. I’d been asleep since burying the birds, and my legs felt hollow when I got up to unlock the door.
“Bobby’s on the roof again,” Sandal said. “He’s all whacked out.”
“Can’t you handle it? Or Emma?”
“The only thing I’m going to do is get the cops to haul him off to the fucking loony bin. I’m so sick of his shit. Besides, you’re the one he wants.”
It was usually a phone call from his mother that set Bobby off. She was kind to him, and nothing but supportive, but all he heard in her voice was pity and disappointment. He’d been royally fucked, as far as I was concerned. What good was it to be crazy if you still felt shame?
The window in Sandal’s room opened onto a small balcony, and from there a ladder led up to the roof. Emma stood on the balcony, her hands cupped around her mouth, her long gray braid coiled on the back of her head. She was talking to Bobby, even though she couldn’t see him.
“I said we’re going bowling. Don’t you want to come?”
Foster was out there, too, shirtless, his tattoos looking like some kind of disease. When I started up the ladder, he said, “If he’s gonna do it, let him. Get too close, and he’ll put a death grip on you.”
My bare feet were sweaty and kept slipping off the thin iron rungs, and the ladder rattled against the house as I climbed. I expected Bobby to be crouched on the edge, where I’d found him before, but this time he was straddling the very peak of the dizzyingly pitched roof, holding on to the TV antenna with one hand, a bottle of Wild Turkey clutched in the other.
“Didn’t you hear?” I said. “We’re going bowling.”
“Have fun,” he replied.
“Can I get a hit of that Turkey?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
I worked my way up the steep incline backwards, like a crab. When I reached the top, I turned and swung a leg over so that I sat astride the house like him, and he passed me the bottle. I drank more than I meant to, and my throat closed off. I spit, but the wind blew it back in my face.
The sun was setting behind the scraggly palms and sagging telephone lines. In the distance, the Hollywood sign leaned rosy against its dark hillside while the sky over the Boulevard soaked up the cheap reds and greens of the tourists’ neon. Bobby stared off in that direction, sliding his thick glasses up his nose with the knuckle of his thumb. What to say now was always a problem, or whether to say anything at all.
“Looks like it’s going to be a nice night,” I ventured.
Bobby nodded.
“Maybe we should get out, see a movie or something.”
“Did you go to your high school reunion?” he asked.
“The ten-year, sure.”
“But you were married then, right? You had something to show off, your wife.”
“My wife? Yeah, I guess I showed her off. Somebody should have shot me.”
Bobby smiled around the bottle, which he’d raised to his lips. Pulling himself up with the antenna, he stood and balanced on the peak of the roof.
“Now, hey,” I said. “Bobby.” If a funnier joke had ever been played on me, I couldn’t remember: putting me in charge of saving someone’s life.
Televisions blared from every open window in the neighborhood, and three kids chasing a soccer ball across the empty lot next door called each other dirty names in Spanish. The streetlights flared once, twice, then all snapped on at once.
“Give me another drink,” I said.
Bobby edged over to hand me the bottle. A good beginning, except that now that he was away from the antenna, he held his arms out like a tightrope walker, wobbling back and forth.
“I’m not going to mine,” he said. “They sent an invitation, but forget it.”
“You won’t be missing much.”
“I was class president, you know. And valedictorian.”
“Hey, meet Best Dancer
and
Best Hair.”
Bobby sat down again just like that and motioned for the bottle, and my first thought was to break it over his silly head.
“I’m the biggest damn bull in the barnyard, aren’t I?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “Yes, you are.”
Something tickled the back of my throat, and I coughed, catching Whatever it was on my tongue and bringing it to my fingers. A feather. Bobby straddled the roof of the house again, and pretended to ride it like it was a bucking bronco, screaming, “Yeeehaw!” his heels scraping the shingles in sync with my squirming heart.
A
CHEER THAT
could be heard throughout the building went up from the picket line. The strike had ended. Our supervisors thanked us for all our hard work and sent us home early, and the strikers chanted, “So long, scabs,” as we were bused out for the last time. It was a solemn ride back to the underground parking lot where we’d gathered each morning for the past month. Some of the women sniffled into great wads of Kleenex.
We’d been cut loose again, and being cut loose was never pleasant, no matter how bad the job. You always took it personally, and it made for some awfully scary grudges. According to the experts, the best strategy to avoid depression was to update your résumé and stay close to the telephone. The agency would call the next day with something else, or the next week, or the next month. It helped to have a friend there, but I didn’t.
S
HELLY’S ACTING AGAIN, ACTING LIKE SHE CARES, SAYING
, “I swear to God, honey, this will change our lives forever.” Reaching across the kitchen table, she burrows her fingers between mine and gives me a pout and wiggle that’s pure porno, and I have to smile back even as I’m thinking,
Who is this tramp?
There are eight Polaroids spread on the table. Eight Polaroids that show a famous young actor doing things with a famous older actor. Sex things. On a bed, on a lawn, in the sparkling water of a swimming pool like the one we’ve always dreamed of owning. Shelly was at a party in the Hills last night, and she claims the photos fell right into her purse out of a book she pulled off a shelf. Somebody will pay for them, she’s sure. First we’ll try the actors, then the
Star
or the
Enquirer
or somebody like that. She figures $100,000 easy.
It’s dirty business for a Sunday morning. I’m starting my first cup of coffee, and she just got home. We spend a lot of our time like this, at opposite ends of the day. I want her to go to bed happy, but the holes in her scheme are as obvious to me as the hickey she’s tried to cover with a smear of flesh-colored makeup.
I’m working on a tactful way to tell her that she’s gone too far this time, when the kid, giddy at seeing us so calm for once in each other’s presence, snatches a Polaroid and makes a run for it. I yell and lunge, but he’s halfway to the TV, slowing to examine his prize. I go over the back of the couch like a hurdler, completely forgetting about the coffee table on the other side. It collapses with a splintery crack, and the kid’s screaming even before I land on top of him. He’s okay, though, just scared. I rub his head until he eases off into a whimper. His teary eyes reflect a couple of cartoon mice skidding across the TV screen, and he slips away to watch them.
Back in the kitchen I crumple the Polaroid and throw it on the table, where it blooms like a flower as soon as it hits. Shelly grabs it and shoves it into her purse with the others, out of my reach.
“People get killed behind this kind of shit,” I say. “Get them the fuck out of here today.”
She rolls her eyes like I’m an idiot. She was different once upon a time, or I was. Her face turns tired, her mouth hateful. “Like you’d be any help,” she says and, without even a good morning for the kid, slinks off to bed. I’m left to ponder that hickey and what to do about it. I stir my coffee and watch it swirl in the cup. If it was possible for me to dive into it and drown, I can’t say that I wouldn’t.
C
ULVER CITY IS
south and east of everything worth anything in L.A. We’re all between jobs here or between marriages, between runs of good luck. We wait out our slumps in flaking stucco apartment buildings, count the stars on our cottage cheese ceilings. There are three different kinds of palm trees between me and the 7-Eleven, and, when the wind’s right, the faintest tang of ocean — just enough scraps of paradise to drive you nuts. We’ve been here too long now to go back, though, no matter how bad it gets. At least Shelly and I agree on that. The great state of Texas can kiss our asses. It was her dream to come out here, and I jumped at the chance to make it happen. That’s how crazy I was about her. With all the nothing I’d seen in my life up until I met her, she seemed to be an extravagant gift from a very stingy God.
I
THROW THE
kid in the truck and head out to see a man about some work, a Mr. Caldwell, who got my number from the sign I keep tacked to the bulletin board at the Laundromat. He sounded drunk when he called, but that doesn’t bother me. Some of the nicest bosses I’ve had have been alkies. A low chain-link fence surrounds his house, and the yard is an expanse of white rocks that crunch like ice cubes beneath my feet. The doorbell plays a church song.
Mr. Caldwell takes a long time to answer, an elderly black man in a bathrobe. I smell booze right away, but like I said, so what? I’ve woken him up, so we spend a few minutes getting straight who I am, him squinting at me over the bifocals hanging on the end of his nose.
“You got something to haul something in, right?” he asks.
