Read The Heartbreak Lounge Online

Authors: Wallace Stroby

The Heartbreak Lounge (4 page)

BOOK: The Heartbreak Lounge
5.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
The rain had slackened by the time he reached Colts Neck. He pulled up the long slope of driveway, left the Mustang in the side yard, not having the energy to push open the barn
door, park inside. He was shivering now, with cold and post-adrenaline hangover.
In the kitchen, the answering machine was dark. He played the tape back anyway, listened to it beep, hiss, click, shut off again.
He hung the wet windbreaker on a peg by the back door. He'd left the .38 with Ray. He wouldn't need it anytime soon. And he didn't want it in the house.
There was half a bottle of red wine left on the counter. He filled a glass, took it with him upstairs. In the bathroom, he stripped off his clothes, tossed them into the corner, the hamper already full. He turned the shower on hot, set the glass on the sink and climbed into the needling spray, felt it loosen the muscles in his back and neck.
After a few minutes, he grew sleepy, twisted off the faucets. He got out, toweled off, took his first sip of wine. Almost instantly he felt his stomach clench, the nausea rise.
He barely made it to the sink. His vomit was thin and watery, dark from the coffee. He gagged as it came up, gripped the edges of the sink. When it was over, he ran water, drank from the faucet, spit and drank some more. He wiped at his face with a towel, then poured the rest of the wine into the sink. It splashed like blood on the porcelain. He left the glass there, walked naked and cold down the hall to his unmade bed.
There were traces of her everywhere: her jewelry box and makeup case on the dresser, a Chinese-print robe hanging from the back of the bedroom door. She had worn it the morning she'd left, hung it on the door before getting dressed. He'd left it there ever since, untouched. When he'd gotten back from taking her to the airport, the sight of it had made him cry.
He dressed for bed, sweatpants and T-shirt, listening to the wind. The farmhouse was more than a hundred years old, had belonged to his grandparents and their parents before them. No matter how much insulating or weather-stripping he did, the cold found a thousand places to enter. The hardwood floor was like ice beneath his bare feet.
In the hallway, he turned the thermostat up, heard the furnace thump and rumble in the basement. He got into bed, switched the nightstand lamp off, lay back on the sheets. When he closed his eyes he saw the muzzle flash of the .22, the kid's legs giving way, the blood on the floor.
After a while, he looked at the nightstand clock, saw it was almost three. He got out of bed, went down the hall to the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet was the Percocet bottle, two months past its expiration date. There were about a dozen left. He shook one out, snapped it in half, swallowed it with a palmful of water.
He'd needed her tonight, more than ever. Needed her to be here, needed her to care about what had happened. To tell him that everything would be all right, whether either of them believed it or not.
When he went back to bed, the sheets had already given up their warmth. He pulled the comforter across him, trembling with cold and more, closed his eyes and let the night take him.
It was in Jamesburg that he first saw the valley. He was fourteen and it was his second jolt there, nine months for aggravated assault.
How it had happened, why the vision had come to him, Johnny didn't know. He'd been in isolation, a one-bed cell, after his second fight in as many weeks. Lying on the thin mattress, coils pushing through it, he closed his eyes and tried to ignore the noises that filtered in from the hallway: yelling, the blare of a TV from the common room and, from the cell next door, the steady crying of a young boy.
The vision came suddenly. A mountain green with trees, so green nothing could be seen through them. He saw it as a bird might, swooping easily, silently. And there, at the base of the mountain, was the Valley, white with mist.
It had calmed him, settled him. And after a while he had tuned out the noise, tuned out that world. His cell had vanished. He was borne on the wind, dropping slowly into the comfort of the Valley.
Where the vision came from, he never knew. But it had come to stay. There in Jamesburg and later on, in other cells. In Glades, there had been times when the idea of spending a single night more behind those walls made him want to open his own throat with the homemade knife he'd kept beneath his mattress. It was those nights he would close his eyes, listen to his own breathing, find himself floating above the mist, the trees.
Later he found he could do it almost anywhere, in seconds, even with his eyes open. In the cafeteria, the weight room, the showers. The vision steadied him, soothed him,
told him he would survive. That, no matter what, the Valley and its peace always waited for him.
When the train pulled into Newark, he opened his eyes, felt the Valley fade. The doors had slid open, people were moving down the aisle. A chill breeze blew through the car. He got up, stretched his legs, took the duffel down from the overhead rack.
Home again, he thought. The longest he'd ever been away. But everything was different now.
He
was different. And nothing would ever be the same.
 
He knocked twice on the trailer door with his fist, loud enough to wake anyone inside. He listened, did it again.
On the street behind him, the cab driver was watching, restless. He knocked a third time, waited, heard a muffled, “Who the fuck is that?” from inside.
It was ten-thirty in the morning. He knew Mitch would be asleep, unless he was still partying from the night before. Johnny knocked again, louder.
“It's me,” he said. “Open the door.”
Movement inside, then locks being undone. He stepped back, waited. The door opened out a few inches, the length of the chain. His brother looked out at him, unshaven and bleary-eyed, most of him still hidden behind the door.
“Hey,” Johnny said.
“Son of a bitch. Hang on.”
The door closed and the chain slid off. Johnny turned and waved at the driver. He pulled away, happy to be out of there.
Mitch opened the door wide.
“Come in, man, come in.”
Johnny slung his duffel over his shoulder. Mitch wore jeans, a white T-shirt, was barefoot. He stepped aside as Johnny came in.
The front room was a mess. Clothes on the floor and furniture. An ashtray full of cigarette butts and burned-out roaches. The smell of stale incense and last night's pot hung in the air.
“You should've called me, man,” Mitch said as he closed and locked the door behind him. “I could have picked you up. How'd you get here?”
“Train,” Johnny said, looking around. There was a widescreen TV in one corner, a stack of unopened stereo component boxes beside it. A tumble of videotapes and DVDs on the floor, kids' movies, a handful of titles he recognized—
Pinocchio, The Little Mermaid.
Seven years inside had given him a sense of order and space, of organization. He had lived like this himself once, but now what he saw offended him.
“Let me take your bag, man.”
Johnny let him take the duffel, unzipped his black field jacket. Somewhere in Delaware, he'd stolen it from the train's overhead rack, bundled it beneath his arm and carried it back to his own car. Three people had watched him, but no one said anything. It was a size too big, but he was grateful for its warmth.
“You got my letter, right?” Johnny said.
“Yeah, but I didn't think you'd be here so soon, bro. I mean, if I knew …”
“It's okay.”
Mitch, still slow with sleep, set the duffel in a corner, began to gather discs and tapes off the floor, stuff them into an open compartment in the TV console.
Johnny heard movement behind him, turned to see a black woman standing in the doorway that led to the back of the trailer. She was in her early twenties, thin, her once-dreadlocked hair now matted and lank. She held a blue terry-cloth robe closed around her, but a small rip on one side showed a patch of mocha thigh. From a room beyond came the sound of another TV, cartoons.
She looked at him, said nothing.
“Sharonda,” Mitch said. “Go get dressed.”
She looked at him, then back at Johnny. She slowly pushed off from the door frame, turned and went back down the hall.
“Go on, man. Have a seat.”
Johnny slipped the jacket off, dropped it on the arm of the sofa. He moved a stuffed dog aside, sat down.
“I was expecting you to call, man,” Mitch said. He sat on a recliner opposite the couch. “I would have made you something to eat or …”
Johnny shook his head. He'd slept little on the train and the fatigue was on him now. He rubbed the stubble on his chin, took off the Marlins cap, set it beside him.
“Oh, man,” Mitch said. “What happened to you?”
“Shaved it all off.” He ran a hand through his thin hair. “In Glades.”
“What for?”
Before he could answer, there was a noise in the hall. Johnny turned to see a black girl of about six standing there, wearing pink zip-up pajamas, bows tied in the rattails of her hair. She looked at him, rubbed sleep from an eye.
“Hi, there,” he said to her. “How you doing?”
She looked back at him without expression. Sharonda appeared in the hallway behind her, dressed now in jeans and a knee-length blue and gold basketball jersey. She took the girl by the hand, gave Johnny a look he couldn't read, then wheeled them both back down the hall and into a bedroom. He watched her go, heard a door close.
“Yours?” Johnny said.
“What? Treya? Oh, no, man. Sharonda had to leave her place. I'm just letting her stay here a few days. It's not what it looks like.”
“I couldn't care less, Mitchy.”
“I know, I'm just saying—”
“You should crack a window, let some air in.”
Mitch got up quickly, went to the window beside the front door, undid the latch and fought with the pane until it opened. Cold air wafted in.
“I can't tell you how good it is to see you, bro,” Mitch said. “Let me get you a beer.” He started toward the kitchen.
“Little early for that. Maybe later.”
Mitch sank back down in the chair. He leaned forward, forearms on his knees, scratched the wiry red hairs on one
arm. Johnny looked at him, sensing his discomfort. Seven years since they'd seen each other, and Mitch not knowing how to feel, how to react.
“How you been getting along?” Johnny said.
Mitch shrugged.
“You know. Same old, same old. Couple bucks here, couple bucks there. Enough not to have to go to bed sober at night if I don't want to.”
“That thing work out for you? What I told you about?”
“With Joey? No, man, he just … I don't know. I guess I just wasn't cut out for it. He said the words but he acted like he didn't want anything to do with me. Had me selling phone cards on the street, believe that? Bogus phone cards like I was some sort of punk-ass scammer. I hung with him a couple months and then I said adiós. He wasn't sorry to see me go.”
“I'll talk to him about it.”
“No, man, don't bother. It just wasn't working out.”
“I wrote him from Glades when I went in, asked him to look after you, throw you something now and then.”
“And he did, man, and now it's over. I already forgot about it. Ain't no thing.”
“You should have told me about it. Wrote me.”
“Like I said, it didn't matter much. All that matters now, man, is having you in the flesh right here. And you look good.”
“I was in the same place a long time, Mitchy. You could have come to see me.”
Mitch shook his head, looked at the floor.
“I thought about it. A lot. But it's just …”
“What?”
“The idea of seeing you like that. In that place …”
“In a cage.”
“I just couldn't handle it. I don't know if that makes any sense. But it's true.”
Johnny got Camels from his jacket pocket, lit one with the Zippo, sat back.
“You look like you could use that beer yourself,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Mitch got up, went into the small kitchen, got a can of Budweiser from the refrigerator. Johnny could see a sink full of dishes. Mitch popped the can, came back into the living room, sipping foam.
“I don't know how long I'm going to be around,” Johnny said.
Mitch sat back down.
“Where you going?”
“I've got some business to take care of. And when it's done I'm probably going to take off for a while. In the meantime, I'm putting something together, little by little. You could have a piece of it.”
“I appreciate that, man, but really … you don't need to. I mean, me and Sharonda …”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I'm doing all right. Not getting rich but I'm doing okay, you know? Like maybe for the first time in a while.”
“Feels good, doesn't it?”
“Yeah. It's just that … I guess I was getting a little old for all that bullshit.” He grinned. “Now all I want to do is sit around and watch the flat-screen, you know? Scratch my nuts, drink some beer. Go out and get paid every once in a while. Ain't bad.”
“I guess not.”
“So you thought about it?” Mitch said. “What you want to do now?”
“Thought about it quite a bit.”
Johnny pinched the cigarette out. When it was cold he put it back in the pack.
“If there's anything I can do for you, just say it,” Mitch said. “Anything. You need a little cash, a place to stay, I'll find you one. I'd let you stay here, man. But the way it is … you know, with Sharonda …”
“That motel still open? In Asbury? Near the beach?”
“Which one?”
“The big one. Across from the boardwalk.”
“As far as I know, yeah.”
“Got wheels?”
“Outside.”
“Drop me there. Let me get settled. I may need to borrow your car now and then for a little bit, till I get set up. That all right with you?”
“Anything, man. Whatever you need.”
Johnny stood up, put his hands in the small of his back, stretched, felt joints creak and pop.
“Let's get going, then. I'm ready to crash.”
Mitch disappeared into the back of the trailer. Johnny could hear voices, muffled, then slightly louder. He shrugged into the field jacket, pulled the cap on. As he hoisted the duffel, Mitch came back out. He wore the same jeans, boots, a hooded sweatshirt under a denim jacket.
They went out the door and when Johnny saw the old Firebird parked two spaces down, he knew it had to be Mitch's. It was a faded bronze, the right front fender primer gray. Mitch locked the trailer door behind them.
They got in, the cracked seats stiff and cold, and Johnny slung the duffel into the backseat. When Mitch turned the key the engine roared, rattled, and Johnny could hear a loose manifold under the hood. Mitch gave it gas, racing the engine, warming it up. The smell of exhaust filled the car. Johnny rolled his window halfway down.
They drove slow out of the trailer park, easing over the speed bumps, the Firebird's engine low and throaty. Some of the trailers were decorated for the holidays, lights in the windows, paper Santas. Just as many weren't.
They turned south on Route 9 and Johnny looked out at strip malls, office buildings. He knew they were passing through Englishtown, where they'd both grown up, but nothing was familiar to him.
BOOK: The Heartbreak Lounge
5.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Reckless by Stephens, S.C.
Six Easy Pieces by Walter Mosley
Knight of My Dreams by Lynsay Sands
Suicide Season by Rex Burns
The Christmas Tree Guy by Railyn Stone
What a Woman Desires by Rachel Brimble
Latin American Folktales by John Bierhorst