Steven Thomas - Criminal Carma

I hoped the real estate deal collapsed on him like an iron bridge.

When I hid the loot in the compartment I had constructed beneath the floorboards under my bed, I kept out one gold coin on an impulse. I wanted to show it to Ozone, to let him see the difference between plastic and real gold.

When I went back downstairs, I found Budge standing in the middle of the living room with his eyes closed. I couldn’t tell if he had stopped to think about something or had passed out on his feet, sleeping like a horse in its stall.

“Budge.” I tapped him on the shoulder, ready to catch him if he fell or duck if he took a swing at a dream-world enemy.

He opened his eyes and looked at me blankly for several seconds, then whipped his head back and forth rapidly, like a boxer shaking off a blow. When he recognized me, he smiled broadly.

“Rob!”

“Yeah!”

“Whatcha doin’, man?”

“Just going to check on Ozone. I saw his light on.”

“Little Oz! I love that kid, man.”

“I know you do.”

“Hey, Rob!”

“What?”

“You got that little blonde upstairs?” He spoke in the sly whisper he always used when talking about women or sex while he was drunk, nodding his head to try and provoke an affirmative answer.

“No.”

“Don’t let that get away, man. That’s some sweet shit. Those pink shorts! I ever got my hands on her little behind I’d lick that brown eye clean as a whistle.”

“It’s a thought,” I said.

“Got to lick the brown eye, Rob,” he said with conviction. “Girls like it. Makes ‘em squeal and squirm.” He wiggled his big body to illustrate and lost his balance, stumbling a couple of steps sideways before getting his feet back under him. “That little girl had me around, she wouldn’t need toilet paper.”

“I’ll let her know,” I said. “You better get to bed.”

“Yeah, um drunker na skunk.”

Listing like a sailboat in the wind, my burly housemate staggered toward the hallway. I watched until he made it into his bedroom, then went out the front door and along the sidewalk to the abandoned house next door. There was a notice from the city taped to the front door, stating that the house was unfit for human habitation and had been condemned. Discenza wasn’t wasting any time.

I left the door open for the light that filtered in from the street and picked my way through the debris on the living room floor to the hallway. Ozone Pacific’s door was open, pale gold leaking into the hall.

I heard someone crying as I went toward the room. The boy was sitting on the floor wearing nothing but his old jeans. His cowboy boots and cowboy shirt were beside him on his sleeping bag. There was a book open in front of him and his shoulders shook as he dribbled his plastic coins onto the colorful pages.

“I’m rich,” he sobbed.

Glimpsing Ozone’s private world, I decided to give him not one but ten of the Krugerrands, or the value of them, to help him get off the street and do something with his life. Both of our houses were condemned, and I didn’t want to leave him wandering homeless when I skipped town.

“Those coins are plastic,” I said from the doorway.

Ozone looked around, frightened, and turned his back toward me as if shielding himself from a blow.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said, crossing the room to stand behind him. “It’s me, your friend Rob.”

“Hi, Rob,” he sniffled, gathering up the coins.

In the light of the caged forty-watt bulb dangling above him I saw that the volume open on the floor was a children’s picture book filled with farmyard scenes. It was old and worn with torn pages, as if it had been much handled. The lush illustrations showed a red rooster crowing in front of a yellow sun, and cows and horses grazing in green pastures.

“Don’t you know those coins are worthless?” I said, trying to draw him back toward reality. “You’re not rich. You can’t spend plastic money.”

“I am, too,” he said, his pathetic tone tinged with anger. “My mom had a lot of money that she showed me. She told me we are rich.”

“Did she finally show up?”

“No,” he said miserably. “She never came back. I waited all day, but then I got scared and tried to find her. She told me not to cross Pacific so I walked down to the end of the beach, looking for her. I was afraid to go any farther. I was afraid she would come back and be mad when she couldn’t find me. She told me to stay by the palm tree. Do you think she came back while I was gone, Rob, and left again when she couldn’t find me?”

“I don’t know, Oz. When did that happen?”

“I was eight,” he said. “It was my birthday. It was summertime.”

“You’ve been waiting for your mother to come back for you since you were eight years old?”

He turned his head to look up at me, keeping his body hunched protectively, his fistful of plastic coins clutched to his chest. Tears were leaking from his eyes. He nodded.

“Sometimes I walk back down to Ozone looking for her, but then I get afraid again and come back. I think she’ll come soon, Rob, don’t you? A man came and said I have to get out of here, and I don’t have any place to go. I want to go with my mom but I don’t know where she is.”

Without wanting to, I imagined the long days he had lived through in the monotonous sunshine, days when loneliness gnawed at him until he couldn’t sit still and he trudged north along the boardwalk, retracing his childhood route to that first stopping point. It had become a Pavlovian barrier, like a disconnected electric fence still restraining horses or cattle that don’t know the shock is gone. Ozone Pacific. A nickname that took hold years before, when boardwalk denizens first noticed his odd geographical limitations.

“Look at this,” I said, taking the Krugerrand out of my pocket and holding the heavy coin out to him. “This is real gold.”

Keeping the plastic disks tight against his chest in his left hand, he reached out with his right to take the Kruger. As he grasped it, I saw that his arm was bleeding. Taking hold of his wrist, I turned his arm and saw several fresh cuts midway between his wrist and elbow. The cuts were surrounded by countless scars. The long-sleeve shirt in all weather.

“Oh, Oz, what are you doing?” The periodic misery that underlay his cheerful demeanor hit me like a knee in the gut. I guess I should have known. People who are always smiling are usually sad.

He pulled his hand free and hunched back over, holding gold in one hand, plastic in the other.

“I’m sorry, Rob. I know I’m not supposed to do it. Please don’t tell anybody.”

“But why are you doing it, Oz? Why would you want to cut yourself?”

I had heard of schoolgirls who supposedly sliced their delicate skin for some kind of perverse satisfaction, but I had never understood it. It seemed like something made up by daytime talk-show hosts to elicit maudlin tears from emotionally congested housewives, not something that actually happened in real life. I knew all about addictions to things that make you feel good, at least temporarily, like alcohol and heroin and sex, but I couldn’t comprehend being addicted to pain.

“I do it when I feel sad,” he said. “It makes me feel better. It hurts, and I think about that and forget about my mom and everything else.”

“What else?”

He leaned his head back and moaned. “All my problems. Baba Raba won’t give me my picture back, and I’m going to get kicked out of my room, and I’m never going to get out into the country. I’m all grown up and I’ve never even seen a cow. I am afraid I am going to be stuck down here forever and never see my mom or the country or anything.”