George Pelecanos - Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

“The speed,” I said. “You’ll feel it in the morning, though, boy. You can believe that shit.”

“I guess that’s what got me going back there, too.”

“You blew the fuck out of that camera, LaDuke. I could have done without that.”

“I wanted to break something.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, it’s not like I don’t know how to handle this stuff. You rib me all the time, Stevonus, ‘Boy Scout’ this and ‘Boy Scout’ that. Shit, I was like any teenager growing up when I did-I tried everything, man. The difference between you and me is, I grew out of it, that’s all.”

“So when’d you stop?”

LaDuke said, “When my brother got killed.” He pointed his chin at the pack of smokes on the bar. “Give me one of those, will ya?”

“Sure.”

I rustled the deck, shook one out. LaDuke took it and I gave him a light. He dragged on it, held the smoke in, kept it there without a cough. He knew how to do that, too.

I put one foot up on the ice chest, leaned forward. “What happened?”

“My brother and I, we were both up at Frostburg State. I was in my senior year and he was a sophomore. It was Halloween night; there were a lot of parties goin’ on and shit, everybody dressed up in costume. I was at this one party; all of us had eaten mushrooms, and the psilocybin was really kicking in. Just about then, a couple of cops came to the door, and of course everybody there thought they had come to bust the shit up. But they had come to get me, man. To tell me that my brother had been killed. He had been at this grain party, up over the Pennsylvania line. Driving back, he lost it on a curve, hit a fuckin’ tree. Broke his neck.”

I hit my cigarette, looked away. The tape had stopped a few minutes earlier. I wished it hadn’t stopped.

“So anyway,” LaDuke said, “they took me to identify the body. So I was in the waiting room, and there was this big mirror on one wall. And I looked in the mirror, and there I was: I had dressed up like some kind of bum that night, for the party, like. I had bought all this stupid-lookin’ shit down at the Salvation Army store, man. None of it matched, and goddamn if I didn’t look like some kind of failed clown. I looked at myself, thinkin’ about my brother lying on a slab in the other room, and all I could do was laugh. And trippin’ like I was, I couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually, they came and put me in another room. This room had quilted blankets on the walls-the kind moving guys use to cover furniture-and a table with a pack of Marlboro Lights in the middle of it, next to an ashtray. And no mirrors. So that was the night, you know? The night I decided, It’s time to stop being some kind of clown.”

I stabbed my cigarette out in the ashtray, lit another right behind it.

“That’s rough, Jack,” I said, because I could think of nothing else to say.

“Sure,” he said. “It was rough.” He rubbed at the tight curls on top of his head, looking down all the while. I drew two beers from the ice, put them on the bar.

“How’d your father handle it?” I said.

“My father,” LaDuke muttered, savagely twisting the cap off the neck of the bottle.

I watched him tilt his head back and drink.

“What’s wrong with you, man?” I said.

LaDuke tried to focus his eyes on mine. I could see how drunk he was then, and I knew that he was going to tell it.

“My father was sick,” LaDuke said. “ Is sick, I guess. I haven’t seen him for a long time. Not since my brother’s funeral.”

“Sick with what?”

“His problem.”

“Which is?”

LaDuke breathed out slowly. “He likes little boys.”

“Shit, Jack.”

“Yeah.”

“You tellin’ me you were abused?”

LaDuke drank some more beer, put the bottle softly on the bar. “I was young… but yeah. When I finally figured it out-when I figured out that what he was doing, when he was coming into my room at night, handling me that way-when I figured out that it was wrong, I asked him about it. Not a confrontation, just a question. And it stopped. We never even talked about it again. I spent the rest of my childhood, and then my teenage years, making sure the old man stayed away from my little brother. When my brother died, man, my life was finished there. I got through college and then I booked.”

“Booked where?”

“I went south. I never liked the cold. Still don’t. Lived in Atlanta for a while, Miami after that. I had a degree in criminol ogy, so I picked up work for some of the security agencies. But, you know, you tend just to come back. I’ve been looking for answers, and I thought I might find out more about myself the closer I got to home.”

“You’ve talked to your father?”

“No.” LaDuke took in some smoke, crushed the cherry in the ashtray. “I guess you think I ought to hate him. But the truth is, I only hate what he did. He’s still my old man. And he did raise me and my brother, and it couldn’t have been easy. So, no, I don’t hate him. The thing is now, how do I fix my own self?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t believe in this victimized-society crap. All these people pointing fingers, never pointing at themselves. So people get abused as kids, then spend the rest of their lives blaming their own deficient personalities on something that happened in their childhoods. It’s bullshit, you know it? I mean, everybody’s carrying some kind of baggage, right? I know I was scarred, and maybe I was scarred real deep. But knowing that doesn’t straighten anything out for me.” LaDuke looked away. “Sometimes, Nick, I don’t even know if I’m good for a woman.”

“Oh, for Chrissakes, Jack.”

“I mean it. I don’t know what the fuck I am. What happened to me, I guess it made me doubt my own sexuality. I look at a man, and I don’t have any desire there, and I look at a woman, and sometimes, sexually, I don’t know if it’s a woman I want, either. I’m tellin’ you, I don’t know what I want.”

“Come on.”

“Look here,” LaDuke said. “Let me tell you just how bad it is with me. I go to the movies, man. I’m sitting there watching the man and the woman makin’ love. If it’s really hot, you know, I’ll find myself getting a bone. And then I start thinking, Am I getting hard because I wish I was him, or am I getting hard because I wish I was her?”

“Are you serious, man?”

“I’m not joking.”

“Because if you’re serious, LaDuke, then you are one fucked-up motherfucker.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” he said. “I am one seriously fucked-up motherfucker.”

Both of us had to laugh a little then, because we needed to, and because we were drunk. LaDuke’s eyes clouded over, though, and the laughter didn’t last. I didn’t know what to do for him, or what to say; there was too much twisting around inside him, twisting slowly and way too tight. I poured him another shot of bourbon, and one for myself, and I shook him out another smoke. We sat there drinking, with our own thoughts arranging themselves inside our heads, and the time passed like that. I looked through the transom above the front door and saw the sky had turned to gray.

“You ze=ooked thrknow, Jack,” I said, “you were right about everybody having some kind of baggage. I never knew my mother or father; they sent me over from Greece when I was an infant. I got raised by my grandfather. He was a good man-hell, he was my father-and then he died, and my marriage fell apart, and I thought I was always gonna be alone. And now I’m fixing to blow the best thing that’s ever come my way. But, you know, I’ve got my work, and I’ve got this place and the people in it, and I know I can always come here. There’s always someplace you can go. There’s a whole lotta ways to make a family.”