The Good Neighbor (17 page)

128
W
ILLIAM
K
OWALSKI

Wells to the comic-book adventures of
Rom the Spaceknight
. She’d particularly liked Rom, who had been turned into a cyborg, the poor dear, and as if that wasn’t misfortune enough, he also suf fered the indignity of being practically anonymous in the world of comic book superheroes. No one else had ever heard of him; Rom never made it into the pantheon of critically accepted do-gooders. She’d found him one day in the comic book rack of an Indianapo lis convenience store, hidden away behind
Sgt. Rock and Easy Com pany
and
The Unknown Soldier.
Here, Francie felt, was someone who deserved her sympathy, a neglected galactic savior she could nurture. She’d bought the first issue for fifty cents in 1978, so new it was still damp, and she hoped vaguely it would become a classic someday. As far as she knew, it was still somewhere in her child hood bedroom back in Indiana—the only first issue of anything she’d ever bought. When it had sat in obscurity long enough, per haps it would become a classic. This was the same curious di chotomy to which Francie found herself subjected. The world would not be ready for her poetry until she had suffered in silence throughout her life, and then died, alone.

And childless, apparently.

But she had decided to put that out of her mind.

Many of these books featured astronauts on the covers. Despite herself, she had to giggle at these clean-cut white men from the future, with their military-style brush cuts, their perfect, twenty- fifth-century teeth, their form-fitting suits that somehow pro tected them against the depressurization of outer space while sacrificing nothing of comfort or athleticism. Francie flipped through idly, discarding them when the action failed to grab her. Going deeper into the box, she found even older books, boys’ ad venture stories in hardcover:
The Iron Boys in the Steel Mills
.
The Dreadnought Boys
.
The Boy Allies
. The original
Hardy Boys
series.
Tom Swift and His Amazing Flying Machine
. These books contained no illustrations, save for an engraved frontispiece; they were from the era before comic books. Checking the publication dates, Fran

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cie saw that some of them were over eighty years old. Automati cally she checked the flyleaves, a habit she’d picked up over a life time of browsing books to see if any former owners had left their mark. The name R
ANDALL
F
LEBBERMAN
had been inscribed into each one, in careful, uneven block letters.

❚ ❚ ❚

She’d not been up there more than five minutes when she heard footsteps on the stairs. Turning, she saw Michael, bearing more candles, light puddled under his chin and illuminating the search ing tendrils of his scraggly beard. Francie drew her robe more tightly about her.

“Hi, Sissie,” said Michael. “Came up to see if you’re okay.”

“I was reading,” she said. Michael sat next to her. “How’s your nose?”

“It’s fine. Way to lay into him. You showed him a thing or two, I guess. You, uh . . . you really okay?”

She nodded, pressing her lips together.

“I just wanted to tell you . . . I don’t know. Sorry, I guess. I never knew you wanted a baby that bad. But I guess it makes sense. I mean, you’d be a great mom and everything.” He cleared his throat. “Uh . . . you do know that vasectomies can be undone, right? Like, they’re not permanent? I think I saw that on the Dis covery channel.”

“No,” said Francie. “It’s better this way.” “What d’you mean?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. It just wasn’t meant to be, that’s all. Not with him.”

Michael nodded. “He wouldn’t be much of a dad.”

“And I wouldn’t be much of a mother,” she said. “Not in the condition I’ve been in.”

Michael’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”

Francie sighed. “Never mind. I don’t want to talk about it.”

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OWALSKI

“All right. Holy crap, look at these old books!” Michael said, switching gears without a pause. Francie had always envied his ability to drop things once they became boring, without a mo ment’s guilt or hesitation. “They gotta be worth a million bucks by now!”

“I doubt it,” she said. “I hardly recognize any of them. It’s only the famous ones that are worth anything. This Tom Swift, maybe.” She passed her fingers over the cool cloth-covered card board. It was in decent condition. Walter would know something about it, surely.

“What are you gonna do with them?” “They’re not mine.”

“Yes, they are. It’s your house, isn’t it?”

“Randy Flebberman’s name is in them. They must have been his when he was a kid. I guess they got left behind here.”

“So?”

“So, they’re still his,” said Francie. “If he wants them.”

Michael opened a comic book and held it close to his candle. He scanned the dot-matrix images, pulling yet another joint from be hind his ear like a magician, wetting one end of it on his tongue. He interrupted his reading to hold the joint to a candle and take a deep drag, the dried flowers inside popping and crackling. He of fered it to Francie, who surprised him—and herself—by taking it. Normally she steered clear of the stuff. But what did she have to lose now? she thought. Nothing. She could be dying, after all. No one could survive what she’d gone through tonight. The harsh smoke spilled into her lungs and began almost immediately to leak out their perforated bottoms. She pulled her robe even tighter and handed the joint back to Michael.

“You really should stop smoking this stuff,” she said. “You’re gonna get into trouble.”

“With who?” he snorted. “Mommy and Daddy?”

“It’s your health I’m really worried about. Once in a while is okay, but you do it too much.”

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“It’s part of my personality,” said Michael, unperturbed, not looking up from his comic book. “It’s who I am. I do what I do, and you do what you do, and nobody should be judging anybody.” “It’s just not good for you, that’s all,” she said. “I don’t like to

see you hurting yourself.”

“Remember when we used to sit up and read under your covers with the flashlight?” Michael asked.

“You didn’t read. You made me read to you.”

“That’s because I
couldn’t
read. The letters were all backwards.” “I know. Poor kid.”

“Don’t poor kid me.”

“I can’t help it,” said Francie. “You’re so cute.”

“Shut up.” He lay on his back and tried to read that way, then abruptly sat up again and threw the comic book to the side. “It’s still really hard,” he complained. “Mom and Dad always thought I was faking it. They thought I was lazy.”

“They know better now,” she said. “That you had a disease. It wasn’t just in your head.”

“Whatever,” he said. “They’re not exactly role models them selves.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, of how to live a perfect life. Dad’s a racist prejudiced bigoted asshole. If he met some of my friends he’d have a heart at tack.”

So would I, probably, Francie thought, though she knew Michael was right about their father.

“And Mom—she’s just a country club gal. Christ. Take them out of Indianapolis and they’re like fish out of water. All they do is find fault with everything. Complain. Did I ever tell you about the time they came to visit me at school, what a nightmare that was? Dad couldn’t believe I had a black roommate. Like, he thought I was playing a joke on him. He thought Al
worked
there. I wanted to kill him.”

“I know. I heard all about it from Mom. They do the best they

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OWALSKI

can, is all. They’re middle-aged Midwesterners, Michael. They were raised a certain way, to believe certain things. You really can’t change people, much as you might want to.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Now listen,” she said. “What were you telling me about be fore, when the power went out?”

“What?”

“Before. You sounded like there was something wrong. Like you were about to tell me there’s something going on. This is the third time I’ve asked you now. So, out with it.”

“Oh, yeah.” Michael sighed heavily. “Well, I, uh . . . I got into a little mess in Denver.”

“What kind of mess?”

“Well, after I hooked up with Yolanda, she took me over to these guys’ house where she lived sometimes, right? And so I ended up staying for a few weeks. They were really cool to me. I ran a few errands for them, you know. Helped out a little. But, ah . . . well, there was this raid, right? The whole street was all blocked off with cop cars and shit. I missed it just by a second. I was just coming back from a . . . an
errand
, and I saw all the sirens in the street, so I just kept on going. Lucky is not the word, really. I was like, holy shit! You never fucking know, man. I came
this close
to getting popped.”

“And you were selling drugs for them,” Francie said.

Michael stared at her, as if amazed by her mental powers. “No, not really, Sissie, I was just—”

“‘Running errands,’ ” she finished. “Right?”

“Well, I never actually
saw
what I was delivering,” said Michael, “so it’s not my fault, right? They can’t prove anything.”

“Michael, this is serious!
Really
serious! Do the police know who you are?”

“Well, here’s the messed-up thing about that. The day before the raid, this meter reader came to the house, right? And he asked me if I lived there, and I said yeah, sort of, and he asked if I could

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give him my name just so he could put it down as the person he talked to, and I said sure, and like an idiot I let him see my driver ’s license. And then he read the meter and went away.” Michael paused, thinking. “He was a nice guy, actually.”

“But he wasn’t a meter reader.”

“I don’t think so. I think he was a cop. In disguise, like.”

“Yeah, well, Michael? For future reference, meter readers don’t ask to see ID.”

“I know that
now
, Sissie.”

“So, they know who you are. They have your address.” “My old school address. That’s what’s on my license.” “Still. They have your name. They can track you.”

“I know,” Michael said. “That’s why I came out East again. I sorta need to lay low for a while. Don’t tell Colt, okay? He’ll kill me.”

“Believe me, I won’t say a word. But Michael . . .” “Yeah?”

“If the cops show up here . . .”

“I know. I don’t even wanna think about it. I doubt they will, but still, you never know. I was gonna ask if . . . I mean, I figured I’m better off with you guys for a while, even with the caveman downstairs. Do you think I could crash with you? I mean like, longer than a few days? Like... indefinitely?” He reached out and took one of Francie’s hands in his, interlacing their fingers. “I’m re ally fucked here, Sissie. I don’t know what to do.”

“Colt won’t like it,” said Francie. “I know, but . . .”

“But who cares,” said Francie. “You’re my brother. It’s my house, too, no matter what he says. He’s going back to the city on Monday, anyway. And he’ll be gone until Thursday.”

“Right,” Michael said, sighing with relief. “I forgot that.”

“So if we can make it through the rest of this week and the weekend, it can be just the two of us. For a few days, at least.”

“How romantic,” said Michael. “Just like the old days. Listen, there’s something else, too.”

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OWALSKI

Francie rubbed her face tiredly. “Something else? How can there be more?”

“You know how I was saying I had to just keep on going in stead of stopping, when I saw the cops on their street? The day of the bust?”

“Yeah?”

“Well,” said Michael, “that was because I just happened to have ten kilos of dope in the car at the time, and I didn’t know what else to do with it. So . . . I kind of brought it all with me. It’s in my bus now.” He looked at her with a self-satisfied expression. “There,” he said. “
Now
I’ve come clean.”

“Oh, my God, Mikey,” said Francie, turning pale. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“No,” said Michael. “I wish I was.” “What on earth are you—”

“I’m gonna give it back,” he said. “And how are you going to do
that
?”

“Well,” Michael said, “I figure they’re going to look me up sooner or later, just like you said. Not the cops. I mean, the guys who own it. It’s worth a lot of cabbage to them. And when they find me, it’s all going to be there. Every bit. I’m not going to touch any of it. And I can just sort of hand it over and explain the whole thing, and hopefully they’ll understand. I mean, these aren’t like cold-blooded killers or anything. They’re nice guys. I
know
these guys.”

“You knew them for . . . how long? A few weeks?” “Yeah. Something like that.”

“And on that basis you would trust them with your life.” “Sissie, come on. This isn’t Scarface we’re talking here. It’s not

Al Capone. It’s just . . .
guys
.”

“Guys who deal very large amounts of drugs.” “Well, yeah.”

Francie put her head in her hands.

“Michael,” she said, “you’re never going to learn.”

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“I know,” Michael said—sheepish, grinning, mischievous. “But I’m still really cute, right? Aren’t I? And aren’t you proud of me for coming clean?”

“You have to get rid of it,” Francie told him. “I don’t care how, but you have to. Jesus, Michael, you can’t have that much dope sitting around on our property! What the hell were you thinking? Do you know we could lose our house if the police found it here?”

“Sissie, I told you, I was
running
—”

“You’re always running,” said Francie. “You never stop and think. What if what you’re running into is worse than what you’re running from? And what about how this could affect other people’s lives? You have to start thinking about that, too. Or eventually you’re going to have no one left to help you.”

Michael was silent. He stared at the floor, sulking. “Get rid of it,” said Francie. “Promise me.”