The Key to the Golden Firebird (3 page)

“You know that you're not outdoors, right?” May asked.

A cold stare.

“Could you turn that down a little?”

Palmer turned the volume up another notch.

“Where's Brooks?”

Palmer shrugged.

“She's supposed to be taking me to work in an hour,” May said. “Do you know what time her team meeting is over?”

“There's no meeting today.”

“Then where did she go?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“Did she tell you?”

“No. She just left with Dave when you and Mom were asleep.”

“Dave?” May repeated. “Oh, great.”

Dave had recently come into Brooks's life. He had wide brown eyes, high cheekbones, thick eyebrows, and a fringe of long hair all around his face. He was always smiling a slow, mysterious smile, and he had to lean against something whenever he wasn't sitting down. May begrudgingly admitted to herself that he was handsome—in a lethargic, werewolfy sort of way. She couldn't tell if the two of them were dating, since
Brooks never discussed it. And Dave certainly wasn't shedding any light on the subject. May had exchanged exactly two sentences with him in the three or four months he had been coming by. One was, “I'll go get her.” The other was, “She's coming down.”

If they were dating, Dave stood in stark contrast to Brooks's last (and only) boyfriend, Brian. Brian was the brother of someone on Brooks's softball team—a pleasant, extremely dull guy, who Palmer had blessed with the nickname “Nipplehead.” (There was nothing specifically nipplelike about his head, but the name just seemed to fit. Even their mom, who liked Brian, said, “You know, he really is a Nipplehead.”) He'd disappeared sometime during the events of the previous summer, and no one had asked about him since. Dave seemed nothing like Brian. When Brooks went out with Dave, she came back late and usually drunk. This was a new thing for Brooks. May was still getting used to the sound of hearing her come in and stumble around, doing everything too loudly and dropping stuff in the bathroom.

But only one part of this interested May at the moment: Brooks definitely wouldn't be back in time to take her to work.

“Put my gloves back where you found them when you're done.” May sighed. “Those are my good ones, from Christmas.”

Palmer plunged her gloved hand into the remains of a bag of barbecued potato chips that lay by her side.

“Don't eat those,” May said. “I'm making you dinner.”

Palmer shoved the chips into her mouth and turned back to the television.

Sighing again, May went back to the kitchen and headed straight to the refrigerator. She pulled out Brooks's bottle of Gatorade, poured herself a small glass, and dumped the rest down the drain. The empty bottle she placed in the middle of the counter. She looked out the kitchen window at the pounding spring shower that had come out of nowhere. This would prohibit her from getting to work on her bike—the trusty Brown Hornet, her dad's twenty-five-year-old brown three speed, complete with “guy bar.”

She could call her mom on her cell and tell her what Brooks had done, but there was no point. Her mom would be halfway to downtown Philadelphia by now, weaving her way through Saturday night traffic to get to the hospital. She would sigh and swear in Dutch and say something about having to talk to Brooks, but she wouldn't. Lecturing Brooks was as useful as lecturing a cat.

So May sipped the Gatorade and looked out at the rain.

“Thanks a lot, Brooks,” she said to herself.

 

Brooks had no idea where she was going. She had just gotten in the car when Dave pulled up.

At the moment there were five of them in his Volkswagen, even though it really only held two people comfortably since the front seats were always pushed back to the maximum. Brooks sat in the back with her face pressed up against the window. The rest of her was pressed deeply into Jamie. Jamie was giving off a powerful orangey-jasmine odor, almost candy sweet. Someone else reeked of patchouli incense, cigarette smoke, and fast food. Brooks considered trying to crack open
the window a bit for some unfragranced air, but she would be guaranteed a wet head if she did so. The rain was practically coming down sideways.

“Come on!” Jamie yelled over the music pounding from the stereo. “It's pouring. So let's forget it. I want to go to that tattoo place instead, the one off of South, on Fifth.”

Dave looked at Jamie in the rearview mirror with a bemused expression.

“For what?” he asked. “So you can stand there in front of the place for an hour again?”

“I'm going to get it this time,” Jamie said. “And Brooks wants to go. Right?”

“Sure,” Brooks said, barely listening.

Dave smiled at Brooks in the rearview mirror. It was his let's-humor-her smile. Brooks returned the grin.

“We'll go afterward,” he said. “Relax.”

Small exchanges like this one told Brooks that she was in Dave's inner circle now—the one whose only consistent members were Jamie and Fred. Jamie was an extremely tiny and pale girl with catlike features and black hair cut into a sharp bob. She always wore tight, clubby clothes and three or four necklaces. She waxed her black eyebrows into high, dramatic arches and wore stark red lipstick that never seemed to wear off. She was so strikingly feminine that Brooks occasionally felt like a lumbering guy sitting next to her. Fred always rode in the front seat since he was about six-foot five. He had white-blond hair cut into a little boy's page cut and a tattoo of Snoopy on his forearm.

Along with Jamie and Fred, Dave always had a bunch of guys around him. Different ones every time. Henchmen.
Tonight's random henchman was sitting on the other side of Jamie. He was a weedy guy in a hooded sweatshirt who was interchangeably called “Damage” or “Bob,” but Brooks thought she heard that his actual name was Rick. Damage/Bob/Rick didn't speak. He spent the entire ride trying to remove a thread from the back of the driver's seat upholstery.

Fred passed a plastic soda bottle full of orange liquid into the backseat.

“Who wants it?” he asked.

“I'll take it,” Brooks said, grabbing the bottle. “Jamie's wasted.”

She uncapped the bottle and took a long swig. She shook her head from the force of the strange elixir—it was like gasoline with a little orange added for flavor.

“What is it?” Brooks said, trying to place the sweetness and the hard, burning sensation that came with it. “Rum?”

“King of Pain,” Fred said. “It's got 151.”

“One fifty-one…”

“A hundred-and-fifty-one-proof rum. It makes
really
good fires. You like it?”

“It hurts.” She groaned as the burning in her throat stopped. “But I like it.” This stuff was
fast.
Faster than anything she'd had before, even grain. She was laughing, and her head was thrumming within seconds.

“Hey, Dave,” Fred said. “Can I light it?”

“Not in the car,” Dave replied.

“I'll hold it out the window.”

“Dude…,” Dave sighed. “Relax.”

“This one time,” Fred went on, “I flamed it, right? I was down the shore and I flamed some 151 on the beach. And I
was looking at it. And I totally burned off my eyebrows. Check it out.”

He pushed back his hair and tilted his big forehead in Brooks's direction. She saw that his blond eyebrows were very sparse. The skin underneath was all scar tissue, thicker and whiter than the rest of his face.

“That was hilarious,” Dave said. Even Damaged Bobrick stopped thread picking for a moment to smile.

Jamie was whispering into Brooks's ear.

“I'm going to get it,” she said.

Brooks nodded her approval, even though she couldn't care less if Jamie got a tattoo. She looked out the window at the flag-lined road they were driving down. They were downtown, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In front of them, high above the road and looking like some Greek antiquity, was the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The art museum?” Brooks asked. “Is that where we're going?”

Dave smiled into the rearview mirror again. He turned off the parkway onto a smaller road that wound its way up to the art museum. They drove around its base to a small service entrance for emergency vehicles and maintenance crews, cordoned off by a single chain drawn across two poles. Dave stopped the car, and Fred got out and moved the chain so that he could drive through. The path was narrow, just wide enough for the car. The bushes rubbed at its sides as Dave slunk along, lights off.

“Should we be here?” Brooks smiled nervously.

She could see high windows through the greenery—bits of sculptures, walls of shadowy squares that had to be paintings. To
Brooks's amazement, Dave pulled the Volkswagen right up onto the grand plaza in front of the colonnaded central building and the grand fountain. The building's two wings spread out on either side of them, embracing the entire area. The fountains and buildings were lit up with golden spotlights. In front of them was a huge, steep set of stairs that led down to the boulevard. It was intensely bright, but it was so high up that it was also amazingly private.

“Rocky!” Fred screamed.

“Rocky!” everyone else but Brooks yelled back.

There was a scrambling all around Brooks. Doors flew open, and Fred, Jamie, and Bobrick tumbled out onto the brick plaza. They didn't seem to care at all that there was a deluge going on. Fred and Damaged Bobrick were now screaming out the
Rocky
theme and running haphazardly toward the huge steps. Jamie delicately followed them in her little boots.

Brooks noticed that Dave was lingering behind. Something told her to do the same.

“You going?” she said casually.

“No,” Dave said. “Come on up.”

She slid out of the back and joined him in the front seat, getting fairly drenched in the process. She brought the King of Pain with her.

“Ever see
Rocky
?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, he's this boxer, and he lives in Philly. There's a really huge scene where he runs up these steps….”

Dave pointed to the huge slope of steps directly in front of them, which everyone else was now stumbling down.

“And that song plays.”

Everyone else had passed out of sight by this point, but Brooks could still hear them screaming out the song. It grew fainter as they got lower. She took a long swig of the punch.

“We used to come here a lot last year,” he said. “They do this every time.”

“You don't do it?” She smiled.

“No.” He shook his head. “I've never seen the movie.”

Brooks laughed. Dave grinned back at her. He had a small scar above his upper lip that stretched when he smiled. Maybe they all had scars on their faces. She would check Jamie's face later.

“So,” Dave said, “they don't make you practice softball on Saturdays?”

“During the day they do.”

“How many afternoons a week?”

“All of them.”

“Harsh.”

“It takes up a lot of time,” Brooks said, passing him the punch. Her hand brushed against his jacket. It was a heavy, soft corduroy, lined with a knobby wool that peeked out at the collar and the cuffs.

“You've been playing for a long time, right?”

“Since I was four.”

“Aren't you sick of it?”

“Sometimes,” Brooks said. She leaned against the dashboard and looked down at the view. The dark was dropping lightly, she noticed, like a falling blanket. It caught on the spires of the Liberty Towers first, and they lit up. The yellow clock on top of
City Hall was illuminated. The punch had gummed up all the vessels in Brooks's brain that juiced her nervous reactions. Of course she should be here, in this most illegal of spots.

“I used to dive,” Dave said, taking a sip. “That took a lot of time too. I liked it, but—”

“Exactly,” Brooks cut in. “I like it, but—”

“So quit,” Dave said.

He said it like it was simple, like softball was just something she could give up.

“I can't.” She laughed.

“Why?”

“Because…,” Brooks said, and then found that she had no concrete reason to give. She knew it had something to do with her dad and never having really known a life outside of softball. Her father had put a bat in her hand the minute she was strong enough to hold it up, and that was that. Afternoons and weekends were for playing. She didn't even know what people who didn't play sports did with their time. But she had to admit, she'd seen less and less of a point in playing in the last year.

“Because why?” Dave said. “You don't sound like you want to do it.”

“Sometimes I don't. Lots of times I don't.”

“So don't do it.”

Maybe it
was
that simple. Maybe the problem was that she'd just never thought about quitting as an actual option.

She heard Dave shift in his seat. Something was happening. Tonight was different from the other nights they'd gone out. She felt like he'd wanted to come here for a reason.

“Yeah,” she said, “I guess I
could
quit….”

When Brooks turned her head to face him, Dave kissed her.

A minute or two later Bobrick and Fred reappeared, winded and sopping wet, at the top of the steps. They ran over and threw themselves against the hood of the car. Dave waved them away with one hand, and they disappeared into the scenery, like all good henchmen should.

 

Pete had the radio blasting when May threw open the door to his old Cutlass Ciera. He'd been letting his hair grow, so now it was similar to the way it had been when they were kids—loose and crazy, sometimes forming perfect corkscrews, sometimes just flying out in mad, electrified strands. He was bobbing his head slightly and playing with the zipper on his blue hooded sweatshirt. As May went to sit down, he quickly reached over and grabbed a bunch of papers, plastic bags, unmarked CDs, and wrappers that covered the passenger seat and tossed them into the back of the car.